


Flower and Willow and Steel

by ninemoons42



Category: X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Human, Angst, Cultural Differences, Culture Shock, Dress Up, Familial Abuse, Families of Choice, Flirting, Geisha, Genderbending, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, Investigations, Japan, Japanese Character(s), Kimono, Language Barrier, M/M, Past Abuse, Reverse Big Bang Challenge, Secret Identity, Spies & Secret Agents, Traditional Dance, War Crimes, Yakuza
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-11
Updated: 2012-09-19
Packaged: 2017-11-09 15:56:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 31,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/457288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The hunt for international war criminals has led Erik Lehnsherr all over the world and then some, and it's gotten to the point where it's become his life. What is he to do when his list of names leads him to Japan, a culture he knows less than absolutely nothing about? Luckily he's not entirely been left to fend for himself in a strange country where the people speak a strange language and follow strange customs. Luckily he's been handed a key - except that this key is a person, and this person is carrying around even more secrets than Erik can guess.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sarlyne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sarlyne/gifts), [nekosmuse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nekosmuse/gifts).



title: Flower and Willow and Steel  
Written for Round One of the X-Men Reverse Bang @ [](http://xmenreversebang.livejournal.com/profile)[**xmenreversebang**](http://xmenreversebang.livejournal.com/)  
author: [](http://ilovetakahana.livejournal.com/profile)[**ilovetakahana**](http://ilovetakahana.livejournal.com/) / [](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**ninemoons42**](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/)  
artist: [](http://sarlyne.livejournal.com/profile)[**sarlyne**](http://sarlyne.livejournal.com/) \- [Art Master Post Here](http://meirylu.deviantart.com/art/XMFB-Flower-and-Willow-and-Steel-314060092)  
rating: R  
X-Men Verse: Mainly XMFC, with additional characters from the comics canon  
pairing: Charles/Erik  
warnings: Cross-dressing and related genderplay. Graphic depictions of violence. Mention of torture, abduction, and sexism. Discussion of familial abuse.  
beta: [](http://tybalt1701.livejournal.com/profile)[**tybalt1701**](http://tybalt1701.livejournal.com/)  
notes: This was basically the prompt of my dreams, and I am so so pleased that it was the one I got, and it was a massive and absolute BLAST to work together with my artist. To Sarlyne: thank you, thank you so much! Your original art prompt gave me all the ideas, and so did all the other pieces you came up with, and you were so receptive and enthusiastic and you were so so lovely and kind to me, and it was such an honor to write this for you that I sort of still don't have any words to begin to describe it. I guess I'll let the story speak for me, all thirtysomething thousand words of it. Much love and all my thanks to you.

[](http://tinypic.com?ref=313rwuf)

**_Flower and Willow and Steel_ **

_One: Kiriya_

Charles washes his brushes and his hands. He frowns delicately at the face that looks back at him from the mirror. The mask he wears every night is almost complete – now he just has to draw in his eyebrows. He selects a soft gray-green shade. All it takes is the right amount of pressure, the perfect wing shape, and he’s done. It’ll do, tonight, and if he’s lucky it might actually hold up to his Older Sister’s scrutiny – but he tucks the pencil away in his bag, just in case, into the same compartment that holds a small pad of blotting papers and a tube of lipstick that is identical to the one on his makeup table.

He turns to the wig stand next, and he can’t keep himself from smiling as he brushes careful fingertips over the accessory that’s already anchored in the hairstyle. Ivory comb, as always – this one is decorated in fine flowing lines, a subtle suggestion of a river or perhaps a meandering mountain path. It is an affectation of his, a tendency to wear something so markedly old-fashioned when everyone else now prefers inlaid wood or carved tortoiseshell, but it is a way to stand out, and a way of being remembered: the well-weathered material, mottled and yellowing with age, against the pure night-black of the wig.

He knows he will have to change to the comb decorated in a pattern suggesting pine needles before the next full moon – he has to bow to the dictates of the seasons, to the dictates of the traditions animating his chosen world.

Easy, now, to tuck his real hair back under a wide cotton band, and then to pin the wig in place. A careful touch to the front section of the bun, making sure it’s all neat, and a glance in the mirror to check the effect of the comb.

Charles smiles, and nods at his reflection, and turns back to the dresser. Next to the eyeliner and the rouge is a felt-lined lacquered box, of the type in which jewelry and hair ornaments are kept – but this box is almost empty; there are only three items in it: three hair sticks, two of which are of tortoiseshell and topped off with simple, polished beads. The third one, on the other hand, is strikingly different.

He puts the stick with the mottled jade bead in the wig, arranging it in the front section so the green contrasts further against his comb. It will be a while before he changes to the other tortoiseshell hair stick, the one decorated with a highly polished bead in scarlet.

The third one is unusual, even for someone already as unusual as he. It is a hairpin that is much longer than is customary, made of brightly polished steel that throws reflections of flared light around the room as he tilts it closer to the lamp next to his makeup table. The pin has three broad prongs instead of the usual needle-thin two. The prongs are set close together, and the outer edges have a ground-down profile, not unlike the cutting edge of a sword.

He anchors it very carefully into the back section of his wig. The edges of the pin are sharp enough to cut through human hair, through the cotton of his under-robes – never mind his own skin.

His finished hairstyle is a collection of strange contrasts: appealing ones, to be sure, but he knows how some people could be unsettled by the overall effect. Against the rich backdrop of black hair: aged ivory, bright jade, the subtle sheen of the steel – a combination calculated to attract attention, a collection of colors to draw the viewer in.

The performance begins with the presentation. He’s chosen to present himself like this. The first glimpse of his hair, of his accessories, his back turned to the person or persons looking at him, because he’s walking, or because he’s struck the opening pose of a dance. This is crucial for him, and he works hard to make the right impression, every night, every time.

And that’s before the audience sees all the other stark opposites in Charles’s face. Skin painted and powdered white except for a sliver left deliberately bare around the edges. Scarlet lips in the shape of a pout, like the bloom of a violet. Delicate cheekbones accented in pale red. His painted eyebrows – and his blue eyes, blue like the sea in an oncoming storm, blue like the last moments of the night sky.

He’s won himself not a few admirers because of the color of his eyes – men and women who write him messages of adulation and affection, who send him extravagant presents at the appropriate times of the year, who ask him to come to their parties because they appreciate his conversation and his dance and his art – men and women who had not initially shied away from the strange light in his strange eyes.

He reminds himself to hold his head high, to sharpen his wits and keep them about him as _she_ advised, as he makes a few more minute adjustments to his sleeves and to the white collar of his under-robe. He is all in white, right now, from shoulders to wrists and knees, and even his feet are enclosed in close-fitting white socks.

And then he rises to his feet and crosses the room, and sticks his head out into the corridor.

There is a man sitting on his knees across from his door, dressed in gray kimono and a haori trimmed in black, all topped off with a stylish purple heko obi, and he smiles when he sees Charles there. “You look lovely, as always,” he murmurs, and bows.

Charles smiles, and bows back, before offering one hand to the other man. “When will you ever stop trying to flatter me, Touya-san?”

“When I stop working, which I should hope is a long way from now,” Touya says, smiling.

Charles’s blush would be visible, if not for the makeup. “I’m lucky to work with such a master as you.”

“And I’m lucky to work with you. Kiriya-san.”

Hearing his professional name here, at the beginning of his night’s work, from the man whose task it is to help him into his costume – his dresser, his _otokoshi_. It is a timely reminder, one Charles is thankful for.

He takes a deep breath, and murmurs thanks, and settles his mind into familiar patterns. He thinks of a willow, which bends and sways to the whims of the wind and never falls before it, never breaks even before the great rage of a storm; he thinks of flowers blooming delicately.

He has his work to do, tonight, and this is the final step of getting ready for it, the final steps in the process of getting dressed.

He takes his place in the center of the room, facing the full-length mirror located next to his makeup table, and he holds his arms out at shoulder level. Charles watches their reflections intently as Touya turns to the cedar-wood stand in the corner of the room and smooths out the material of the colored under-robe – pale pink, patterned all over with tiny white dots. He dips and bends to put it on, following Touya’s instructions and thinking of grace as he moves, and he watches the other man’s hands move skillfully to tie the first set of under-sashes around torso and hip.

A tweak at the sleeves to make sure they line up correctly, pink against white against his skin.

Over that pink robe will go this night’s kimono. Touya handles the material carefully so as not to crease or wrinkle it. The heavy cloth rustles in the quiet of the room.

Charles gazes serenely at himself in the mirror as the silver-gray kimono is placed onto his shoulders. He accepts the great weight and warmth of it with a ready spark in his eyes, with a willing smile on his lips.

From the waist up, the material resembles a delicate brocade, white lines tracing out abstract patterns like sunlight reflected off rippling water. Below his hips, black shadows drift across the cloth in the shapes of bamboo leaves floating on a breeze, settling into pools of darkness all around the trailing hems. Silver threads pick out the veins in the leaves.

The design has been one of his better ideas, Charles allows himself to admit, modesty aside; he had collaborated closely with the owners of his favorite kimono shop when he’d commissioned it. It is an expensive habit that he picked up while still young – but here, in this world, he is actively encouraged to keep it, and in turn he is encouraging others to excel at their own chosen arts. Besides, he can afford the luxury, and cannot in fact survive without it. Unique kimono are a treasure and a joy to own, and, in addition, make excellent presents when it comes time to let them go.

On the other hand, as Touya finishes tying off the final set of cords holding the gray kimono shut, Charles has to admit that there is something much more refined about the pleasures of owning a chest full of gorgeous obi. The one now in his dresser’s hands is checked in black and deep jade-green, several shades darker than his eyebrows. Highlights in a rich crimson-golden thread, tracing out peach blossoms in the black squares.

Charles laughs softly, but briefly, and then he takes a deep breath.

Touya murmurs, encouragingly, “That’s it, steady on, Kiriya-san,” as he ties the even heavier weight of the obi into place – but he knows what he’s doing, knows Charles’s body almost as well as Charles himself does. Touya has done this night after night for the past several years, and Charles trusts him with almost all of his secrets, and with his professional appearance. He trusts Touya with the weight he bears on his shoulders, the weight he bears with his entire body, the weight that only seems to vanish when he’s dancing. He trusts Touya to remember, night after night, the many strains and aches and pains in his bones.

So when the _otokoshi_ steps away, every fold and drape neatly in order, Charles thanks him quietly, presses his hands to his wrist, and bows again – before he turns to the mirror for the last time, and now, despite the combined weight of his kimono and obi, the movement is as easy as breathing.

Aesthetically speaking, it’s a good image that gazes back at him from the mirror, a well-put-together one: clear eyes, not a hair or a line in his face out of place, harmony of pale pink and silver-gray and dark green.

Charles bends carefully at waist and knee to pick up a corner of his kimono, and he takes a moment to admire the effect of the bamboo leaves against his hands. Sometimes he thinks about concealing the constellations dotting his skin, freckles scattered over hands and arms and shoulders – but every time he tries to do that, he gets a scolding that blisters his ears for days, and only afterward can he laugh about his Older Sister’s rather – inventive – turns of phrase.

“Shall we,” Touya murmurs, after a moment.

Charles smiles, and nods, and he glides around the room, tracing out a familiar path: he picks up his bag from his dresser, stopping to tidy up his makeup boxes; he takes his dancing fan from a shelf in the closet, its box cushioned by the well-worn padded robes he sleeps in during the winter; he turns toward the three photographs framed next to the tiny window that looks out onto the house and its interior garden and bows slightly; and then he turns out the lights and steps out into the corridor, robes whispering at his feet as he trails after Touya, at a slow and deliberate pace.

One of the maids squeaks and hurries out of his way as he walks out into the courtyard; he pauses just once, to pay his respects at the little household shrine. The girl bows respectfully to him afterwards. “Have a good evening, Kiriya-san.”

“Thank you,” he murmurs to her, gently, formally. “Kaname, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” and there’s a pleased flush on the girl’s cheeks that can be only partly attributed to the cool weather. There is something delicately pretty in the way she covers her mouth with her hand, something about her sweet and ready smile, and Charles resolves to inquire next day about her studies, after he’s finished with his dance lessons. There is no way that the house hasn’t already got plans for her future – and even his relatively inexperienced eyes can see the promise in her.

For now, though, he contents himself with pressing his free hand to her warm shoulder. “Let us hope it is a good one.”

Out onto the vestibule and Charles steps carefully into his shoes, high wooden heels clicking against cobblestones – then he looks up at the clear evening sky, still distantly painted with the dying fires of sunset, and tilts his head inquiringly at Touya. “To Yachiru-san’s?”

“As you wish,” is the answer.

Touya opens the gate for him, and Charles blinks when he’s greeted by a series of bright flashes and loud clicks – but it only takes him a moment to recover, and he bows deeply and respectfully to the small crowd assembled outside, clustered together on the pavement. There are a few familiar faces here – the daughter of the owner of the sweets shop on the corner; the boy who helps deliver flowers on his bicycle; the little girl in the wheelchair with her solemn-eyed nurse.

“Hello, everyone – good evening,” Charles murmurs. “Thank you for coming, tonight.”

A cheerful chorus of responses, more cameras. “Good luck!” “Have a good evening!” “You look so pretty, Kiriya-san!”

He waves at them, bows once again even as he starts off after Touya, and soon they’re turning the corner into a haze of bright lanterns and plaintive song. The sounds of conversation and laughter issue from open windows and doors, voices bantering rapidly back and forth, and Charles smiles and waves at familiar, friendly faces, already hurrying into and out of various open doors.

The Osaka night is brisk and promises to get colder; there’s a vague scent of snow in the air, and Charles is grateful that Touya is just tall enough to serve as a sort of a windbreak. He can actually see his sleeves and the hems of his kimono fluttering as he walks quickly up the street. He hurries after his dresser, up the block and into the entryway of another house, where they’re greeted by an old woman petting her cat.

Touya takes up a position at the foot of the stairs, and Charles murmurs, “I’ll be right back,” and then climbs up to the second floor, to a familiar door. He knocks four times.

“Come in,” someone says. And – “Ah, it’s you. A little early, Kiriya?”

“I had to walk quickly,” Charles says, hurrying onto his knees and bowing, fighting back the smile. “It’s a windy night out.”

“Then it is a good thing you spend all your time indoors, in warm places. You have to be protected from cold temperatures,” is the reply. She rolls her eyes and laughs, softly, and Charles pretends to frown for just another moment before he, too, is hiding his smile in his sleeve.

The woman is seated in front of a large mirror, and her silver-streaked hair is pinned up in a simple bouffant style. Rich purple kimono, bronze obi with a heavy overlay of silver thread, pristine white collar. She is dabbing perfume behind her ears, and a rich scent like spices and amber fills the space around her. “Straighten your collars. Good work on your eyebrows. Is that the kimono you ordered last month?”

Charles grins as he follows her instructions – and the grin grows wider at the compliment, as he nods to answer her question.

“Good evening, Yachiru-san,” Charles says at last, and he hands her the green-lacquered box when she gestures imperiously for it. “You were marvellous during your dance lesson today.”

His Older Sister laughs again, and tucks the vial of perfume back into the box. “Why am I not surprised? But of course I knew you were there, Kiriya. You and everyone else. Peeking around the doors like so many apprentices. Disgraceful,” she says, but she’s laughing quietly.

“You can’t blame me for wanting to watch,” Charles says. “You’re _natori_ now. I look forward to seeing you dance Princess Tachibana and all the rest. You have such a way of bringing characters to life, when you dance, and I am quite sure I wouldn’t be the first to say so.”

“Fishing for pointers already?” Yachiru teases, as she rises fluidly to her feet.

“Oh, please,” Charles laughs, and follows suit, and in the next moment he’s following her downstairs, putting his shoes back on. He smiles when she pats Touya’s shoulder and winks at him, coquettish and friendly at the same time.

“You mark my words, you’ll be next, soon enough,” Yachiru says after Touya bows and bids the two of them good night. “The last time you performed that solo piece of yours – the one with the butterflies on the river – you left people weeping in their seats. I’d thought you were doing well, in rehearsals, but that particular performance was something else entirely. And don’t say it was because of the music, hmm,” and she waves an admonishing finger under his nose. “The musicians played their best, but the truth was, they’re good but they’re not _that_ good.”

“If I know anything about dancing it’s because I had such good teachers to correct me, and a good example to follow.”

“Modest to the last,” Yachiru says, sighing, and she favors Charles with a sweet little smile. “How strange, for all you’ve been like this for as long as I can remember. Tell me, Kiriya, is that something I’ll never be able to train out of you? Perhaps I ought to just give up. I would think you took the idea of modesty too far just to test me, but I’ve heard you speak even to Touya-san and there ought to be no ideas of being over-scrupulous there. I would have thought that your background,” she says delicately, “would have gotten you accustomed to speaking to people, to people speaking about you.”

Charles stops, right there in the middle of the street, and stares at Yachiru, feeling slightly horrified – and betrayed, though he does his best to tamp that emotion down. He knows he would be pale right now, if it weren’t for the white makeup; as it is, he can _feel_ his eyes widening.

To her credit, Yachiru takes one look at him, and stops as well – and when she sees him frozen there, she retraces her steps and takes both of his hands in hers. There is a spark of real emotion in her eyes, visible even in the half-light of the street.

Charles wonders what they must look like to the other women rushing past, to the men in their suits and the lackeys trailing after them.

Yachiru steps closer, and murmurs for his ears alone. “Kiriya – _Charles_. Listen to me. You know what I speak of. You know what I mean. Stop thinking about – those people. Stop thinking about your past. I am only talking about these nights, these streets. About Osaka, and the rooms in these teahouses.”

Charles tries to smile, and strangely, it’s possible, but only because his Older Sister is looking at him so gently. “My conversation, then?”

Yachiru nods. “That is...a poor name, for the many things it means. I am talking about all the things you do, without even thinking about them, when you come into a party and say hello to the guests and to the other _geiko_. The way you make people feel at ease around you – the way you talk to them, the way you listen to them, the way you smile at them. You do these things so well and so naturally. And believe me, these are worthy things to have and to know, and you have had these with you from the first day you arrived here, in Osaka. You never had to be taught these things, whereas I remember being afraid of joining a conversation, when I was starting out.”

“That was a long time ago, Yachiru-san,” Charles says.

“It is impolite to remind a woman of her age,” is the arch reply.

Her smile is so mischievous that Charles takes a deep breath and finds himself laughing softly, sadly. “I am sorry, Yachiru-san. I do not know what came over me,” he murmurs after a moment.

Memories, he thinks, are difficult things to deal with, whether good ones or bad. He thinks briefly of himself in a shirt with dirt- and ink-stained cuffs, in knee-length shorts; he remembers looking out through eyes blurred with tears, on a street corner not very far from here. He thinks briefly of a woman smiling at him, and he remembers shying away from her blackened teeth; he thinks of silver bars fluttering against dark hair, of a flash of red silk patterned in folded paper cranes.

There’s a touch on his wrist and when he blinks and looks over, Yachiru is shaking her head at him, but the expression on her face is one of pure affection. “I do forget sometimes, Kiriya, that you are different from us – I do not mean to say that to hurt, only that it is a statement of fact.”

“One that is both a gift and a curse, apparently,” Charles says.

“And we are luckier for it,” Yachiru says. “If you believe nothing else I say, believe that.”

“You are my Older Sister,” Charles says, firmly, and he wishes they were in private so that he could express his appreciation and his wonder properly. Somehow, he thinks, there is something to be said for such obvious gestures as hugs and kisses. “And more than that – you were instrumental in helping out a little fool of a little boy, someone who had been friendless and alone and _marooned_ , and this is just the least of the reasons as to why I believe you, why I look up to you.”

“The feeling is more than mutual,” Yachiru says. “I promise you, I could not have asked for more in a Younger Sister.” She smiles, then, and if the smile seems a little watery, Charles politely doesn’t mention it. “Now come, we’re going to be late – tonight I will be down the hall from you, yes? And you will come to join me when I send for you.”

Charles nods and squeezes her hands gently. “I will be there.”

And he takes a deep breath, and thinks about pricking up his ears, and plunges into his night’s work.

The sign over the door of the teahouse is inscribed with characters spelling out the name _Blue Cherry_.

///

_Two: Max_

There is a heaviness pressing down on Erik’s skin, strange shifting sensation that both threatens to pull him into a dragging lassitude and prickles relentlessly at his nerves so he can’t possibly rest.

He’s making a good show of it right now, though, sitting with his feet flat on the floor and his arms crossed neatly over his chest. The sun has cleared the distant horizon, rising in a blue sky, lighting up the fleeting shapes of trees that are little more than black hands reaching up and out. It is late enough in the year that all the leaves have fallen and, as a result, the colors of the landscape seem flat and distant to Erik’s eyes.

The seat on his left, next to the window, is empty – and it has been that way ever since he got on the train, straight from the airport to the train station, another set of tickets from the bulging envelope in his coat pocket. He has merely exchanged one front row of seats for another. All the other seats in the car are taken. There are voices murmuring behind him, infinitely discreet, pointedly polite even as they’re probably discussing him – but no one wants to meet Erik’s eyes.

Just as well, he thinks, and he shifts imperceptibly. His shoulders hurt, and the steady, low-level pain pulls his nerves taut. He might as well be frozen into ice. He’s been tense all throughout his time in transit – which means he hasn’t been able to relax for over thirty hours now. Langley might as well be on another _planet_ entirely.

So much for traveling First Class. It doesn’t make a difference, not when he’s completely ground down, not when he’s nearly at his breaking point, not when he’s spent every single minute of the trip wound tight.

Erik is carrying a list of names around in his head, and almost all of the names have been crossed out.

Almost.

He’s jolted out of his reverie when the entire train rattles, and he glances out the window, glazed eyes confusedly taking in the shifting landscape: sky and fields and distant mountains falling away suddenly to the coast, to the strange shimmer of the sea, and now he can actually see the movement of the leading cars, snapping from side to side in a drunken sway as the train shudders and shrieks, onward over its tracks.

A final burst of speed. The city pulls the train home, pulls strangely at Erik. The suburbs rise around the train and just as quickly recede behind it – and then they’re pulling into the station at last.

Erik is the last passenger out of the car – he’d had difficulty getting up, and even now, as he steps out onto the platform, every movement is a fight against his fatigue, slowly and inexorably pulling him down. Still, he manages it at last, groping for his next set of tickets, for the final set of travel instructions. Langley to Tokyo non-stop, Tokyo to Osaka on a _Hikari shinkansen_ , and now he has to catch one more train. This one is going to a place called Takarazuka.

He feels like he’s running, but he doesn’t know whether he’s running _toward_ a goal or _away_ from it, and that leaves him even more frustrated.

The Takarazuka line is far more crowded than the bullet train was and he sways uncertainly in the crowd of chattering passengers, hanging on to the handrail as best as he can. Sitting down would be folly, in this condition; better to let the ache in his feet keep him marginally aware of his surroundings, at least until he can make it to his destination.

Though he wonders, and not for the first time, whether he’ll ever actually be able to reach that destination; he wonders if this isn’t a joke, if he’s not just being sent off on a wild-goose chase, if he’s ever going to be able to disappear in a place like this.

He is far and away the tallest man aboard the train, as he had been on the _shinkansen_. He is far too conspicuous here, far too recognizable.

Well, if that’s going to be a fact he might as well turn it to his advantage – but he’s got to rest first. He can’t think on this strange wearying rush of moving forward in time – he doesn’t even remember how many times he’s already rewound his watch, the hours advancing as he’d crossed what feels like most of the world’s time zones.

He’s wrinkled and bedraggled when he finally makes it to Takarazuka. There is something promising in the hush of the platforms, as compared to the loud, incessant chatter of Osaka – but Erik is once again unnerved when someone appears on the platform opposite his and. Well.

The first thing Erik sees is the passel of bodyguard-types in identical black suits. After them comes a hoarse, ragged cheer, and then a woman in a sharp green trouser suit and glossy black hair cropped in a daring, boyish style strides confidently onto the platform. With her is a beautiful young lady in a long, flowing dress, an expensive-looking shawl looped around her shoulders. After them streams a group of smiling women of all ages and sizes. The only thing the followers have in common is the jacket they’re all wearing, bright blue emblazoned with Japanese characters written in thick, jagged strokes.

It seems like everyone and everything stops inside the station to look at the two women on the platform as they smile and wave to their followers. The stillness is broken by the whir of a news camera, the click of telephoto lenses and the whine and the cry of an incoming train.

Erik watches the woman in the suit and the woman in the dress as they step into one of the carriages, leaving the ones in the jackets behind, who smile and seem to wipe tears from their eyes as they peacefully disperse.

He has no idea what he’s just seen.

And he doesn’t know what to do now that he’s here; the signs on the station’s walls might be bilingual, confirming that he’s actually in the place where he’s supposed to be, but his instructions end abruptly with the line “Travel to Takarazuka to meet contact.” There is a piece of paper in the envelope that has a name and an address on it – but Erik knows nothing about this place, and he’s fairly sure he’ll end up standing on the sidewalk outside the station looking exactly as lost as he feels right now.

Or is it that he’s been lost for a long time – directionless except when there’s a set of orders in his hands? Is he otherwise incapable of actually functioning out in the real world?

He really is too tired and much too sober besides. He’d like a drink now, and a bed. Food can come later. The language can come later. He’s completely worn out.

Someone is walking toward him – and too late to do him any good, the adrenaline surges through him, and he turns around in a hurry.

“Hello there. You look like you need some help.”

Erik gets an impression of dark green threaded with maroon and black, a fleeting glimpse of copper and auburn, white collar pulled down low in the back. Hair pinned away neatly at the nape of the neck.

But it’s the blue eyes that catch his full attention – blue eyes, here, coupled with a sweetly lilting voice speaking perfectly intelligible English. There might even be some kind of vaguely European accent woven into the words. It’s enough incentive for Erik to wake up, to scrabble clumsily for the manners that someone must have taught him when he was younger. “Hello,” he croaks back.

“Oh dear.” Those blue eyes are peering warily into his face. He wonders what the other person sees, but before he can start asking, the voice is hurrying on: “Have you actually been sent here non-stop? What an absolutely beastly thing to do to someone like you. I’m sure you’re quite at the end of your rope. Come, there’s no time for pleasantries. We can try those another time, when you’ve enough of your wits back about you.”

There is a hand being held out to him. Erik grasps it in both of his own. Freckled skin stretched over delicate bones, small and hot against his chilled hands.

He wonders about the smile he can hear in the stranger’s voice: “You must be...Max-san, yes? I was told to expect someone named Max?”

“I am?” Erik winces; he doesn’t mean to be questioning his own identity. But he’s in another country entirely, and he’s still really disoriented in time, and it’s hard to keep track. “I mean, yes, that’s me. Max Eisenhardt.”

“I’m...I’m your contact, for lack of a more civilized word. Please, call me Kiriya.”

It’s only polite to return courtesy for courtesy, and Erik remembers this much from the briefing at Langley. “Pleased to meet you, Kiriya-san.”

That gets him a rueful laugh. “I just said we could dispense with politeness for now, didn’t I? Good lord, they _will_ be getting an earful from me, the next time they make the mistake of calling in to check. No one ought to be subjected to such terrifying travel conditions.”

And then for some reason that sweet voice descends into something that sounds very distinctly like swearing in several languages. There’s a smattering of French in there somewhere, and a little bit of something that sounds somewhat like Russian to Erik’s addled brain.

Erik wishes he could laugh. The disconnect is too great – a gentle and welcoming manner; a beautiful outfit; red hair; _freckles_ , for goodness’ sake – and yet his contact swears very colorfully. It is one of the most incongruous things he’s ever known.

He vaguely registers that they’re walking out of the station; he’s aware of being bundled into the back of a cab and for a moment he feels a distant flare of alarm in his head, because he’s a stranger in this indecipherable place and he has no idea where this cab’s about to take him – but Kiriya is speaking imperiously to the driver, free hand hovering somewhere above the pristine collar for some reason, and they’re off.

He fumbles in his coat pocket for his envelope, and he pulls out the slip of paper. The typed letters are smudged now from too much traveling and because he’d checked them again and again on the last train. “This is you? Kiriya of Osaka?” He blinks, and asks the first question on his mind. “What are you doing here? This isn’t Osaka. I got there and then I left.”

“I came to Takarazuka specifically to find you,” Kiriya says. “And to brief you on what needs doing here – but I hardly think you’re fit for that kind of conversation right now. You wear me out, just looking at you.”

He blinks when Kiriya abruptly looks away, and then hides a yawn behind one voluminous sleeve. “Please excuse me.” There’s a blush deepening over the freckled cheeks. “It is rather early in my day.”

Erik is conscious enough to be surprised, and sorry. “My...my apologies.”

“Oh don’t start on that again, please?” There is a hand on his wrist again, warm through the layers of coat and suit. “At least I know I volunteered for this.”

“So did I,” Erik mutters.

“You’ll forgive me my rudeness, but that’s really rather hard to believe right now, not when you look like you’ve just been dragged through the nine hells and back. Begging your pardon, Max-san.”

“I can be offended some other time, Kiriya-san.”

He gets a quiet laugh for his efforts, and he smiles, sleepy and satisfied, and then he’s being pulled out of the cab and walked through a low gate. There are voices speaking nearby. Someone, perhaps Kiriya, is murmuring instructions to him, and he manages to step out of his shoes and get out of his coat, and he sleepwalks through a series of open – walls? Or were they doors? Before long he feels hands on his shoulders, pushing him down.

“This is the address that you were given – it’s the place where you’ll be staying for the time being,” a voice murmurs from somewhere very close by. Erik can’t even tell if the speaker is a man or a woman – he’s barely conscious enough to recognize his surroundings, to register that he’s in a small room and that there are quilts piled on the floor, gravity and fatigue pulling him down and into the soft material. “And now you should sleep. Your things are right here with you, within arm’s reach. But please don’t think about them right now. You’re safe here. Rest as much as you need to. I’ll see you soon.”

Someone is pulling the knot of his tie apart, is undoing the buttons at his collar. He doesn’t fight it, and he doesn’t fight the voice that is murmuring to him. He doesn’t understand the words, just the intent, and he murmurs something incoherent, something that he hopes sounds like _Danke sehr_ , and then he gives himself up to the silence of sleep.

*

Erik knows he wakes up several times: once to use the privy, and thrice to drink water. Once to voices singing softly, just outside his room; none of them sound familiar, but they rise and fall in gentle, plangent harmony.

Even here, the nightmares follow him – but he forces himself to go back to sleep every time. He’s only been having that dream for years now. A familiar pain in his mind. Voices calling, and cut off by a gunshot. Nothing he can’t handle.

But this doesn’t mean that it hurts any less.

After the dream repeats itself for the third time, shadows raising an incoherent babble of grief and rage in his memory, he resigns himself to wakefulness, and he struggles up from the quilts at last. Wide awake, now. He takes stock of himself, and of the place he is now in.

The suit he’s been traveling in is even more of a ragged mess now that he’s tossed and turned in fitful sleep in it. He mutters irritably under his breath, and strips, and starts making a list of the things he’s going to need to do. Clothes, naturally, come first on the list – and he reaches for his bag, and pulls out a change of clothing.

He looks ruefully at his wrinkled suit and wonders about getting it cleaned – he wonders if there’s any way he can ask Kiriya for help on that end – and he starts compiling the list of questions that he has to ask his contact. There are frivolous questions, like where to buy clothes in his size; there are questions about the lay of the land, such as the transportation routes connecting Takarazuka, Osaka, Kobe, and Kyoto; there are questions about the names on his list.

A list of men and women and their...misdeeds. A mild way of putting it, and a strange way of keeping track of time as it passes him, as he runs forward into it and wishes he had more of it. He’s already lost the reasons for creating the list in the first place – all except for the dreams that drive him on, a merciless goad that not even the artificial sanction of government authority can remove from him.

Not that he wants to lose the instincts that have kept him alive for so long.

But Erik has been tired for such a long time, long before this grueling trip around the world, chasing leads and chasing all kinds of evil, and he _knows_ Nietzsche, thank you very much. He knows what he doesn’t want to become, and he knows with the same inevitability that there may well be nothing stopping him from going over the edge of that abyss.

For some reason that makes him think of Kiriya, of a serene light in strange blue eyes.

The envelope that had been in his coat pocket has been placed next to the bag, the flap folded closed – but when he opens it to look through his tickets and his documentation there’s something else in there, something new. He draws the new sheet out. The handmade paper, ivory speckled in green and brown, is a far cry from the institutional, standardized, many-times-creased white bond.

_I hope you do not mind that I took liberties with your possessions. But I had to find some way of letting you know some of my contact information so that you could find it as soon as you woke up. If you need to speak to me during the daytime, you may send word through the house called Iwakura. Directions and a telephone number are at the bottom of this note. Ask for Touya._

_After six in the evening you may ask for me at the Blue Cherry, the establishment with which I am principally affiliated. If I am not there you may trust any one of the maids to carry a message to me._

The note with its address is signed _Kiriya_ in three alphabets.

Erik can’t help but think that the signature is part of the message, as well, and he does his best to memorize the meandering curves of the Japanese and Chinese characters, as well as the elegant loop of the Y in the Latin letters. He might not be able to write them all correctly on the first go – but he’s pretty sure he can at least say his contact’s name correctly.

By the time he’s washed his face and combed back his hair and retrieved his coat and shoes, it’s late afternoon; Erik carefully slides the front door that is also part of the wall of the house closed, still surprised that it’s made from paper and fine-grained wood, and spends several minutes looking at the house, and up and down the street. Now that his head is clear enough to take in the details, he commits them carefully to memory. The house is low-slung and built out of wood and stone, shaped somewhat like an L.

He’s standing on the short path that leads to a low gate carved in the shape of a seashell; beneath his feet are rough-hewn dark green rocks set against hard-packed earth.

There is a smooth purring sound that is easily identifiable as an engine, and when Erik looks at the street there is a car driving up outside the house. He’s instantly alert, and within a hair’s-breadth of reaching for the knife that he carries everywhere with him. The blade is blood-warm and easily reached, strapped into the small of his back.

The man in the driver’s seat steps out, and clears his throat.

Erik steps out of the gate, and looks him up and down. White dress shirt with some kind of standing collar, sharply-creased cuffs sticking out of a man’s version of the robes Kiriya had been wearing, in dark brown banded in black. Voluminous, structured trousers in pinstriped gray-on-gray. White socks and black slippers.

After a moment, the man says in heavily accented English, “Sent to you by Kiriya-san. I am Touya.”

That name. Erik squints at him, and pulls out the piece of handmade paper instead of his knife. “You recognize this handwriting?”

Touya favors him with a slight curve of a smile. “I wrote address,” he says.

He could be insulting Erik, or he could be just that deadpan.

But here and now, Erik contents himself with asking, “This is _your_ address, right?”

_“Hai.”_

“I’m going to assume you just said yes,” Erik mutters, not quite under his breath. “All right, if you’re really the Touya in this note, I’ll go with you. Just – you’d better not be up to any tricks. I’m armed.

“Where to?” he asks, as he gets into the passenger seat.

Touya gets the engine revved up and they’re pulling away from the house before he answers. “Osaka.”

Erik is tense and coiled for fight-or-flight as Touya drives rapidly, out of Takarazuka and then into the greater sprawl of Osaka, over a startling number of bridges, but the man seems to know exactly what he’s doing and he competently pushes the car up through the gears, cruising easily down winding streets – until they pull up right outside what looks like some kind of extended cul-de-sac neighborhood. The entrance is marked with a tall gate painted in red and black.

“Kiriya’s place,” Touya murmurs as he opens Erik’s door for him.

Erik follows the pointing hand with his eyes – and he sees a seashell-shaped gate, painted in black. “Is this where she lives, or where she works?”

“This is my home, actually,” another voice replies.

He knows that voice.

Kiriya is walking out onto the cobbled street, one hand on the scalloped curve of the black gate.

He still remembers yesterday’s faint impression of vivid contrast; today’s colors are muted, even compared to the haze of the previous day’s memories, but they leave an impression on Erik all the same. Her robe is dyed in several shades of lavender, lighter at the shoulders and then falling into dark meandering lines at the hems, and the wide belt around her waist is silver overlaid with an intricate design in black. Neatly coiffed hair in almost the same style as yesterday’s, down to the metal hairpin.

She is _exquisite_.

And she is waving at him, looking highly amused. “I see you and Touya-san did not manage to kill each other. Too bad,” and she wrinkles her nose and covers a smile with her sleeve.

He can remember that gesture at least, though she had been covering her mouth for another reason, and there is a grace in the movement that convinces him of her identity.

Well, that and the blue eyes.

From behind him, he can hear Touya laughing softly, and it makes Erik narrow his eyes – but he’s almost instantly distracted by Kiriya’s free hand on his wrist, a familiar touch, fleeting, warm. It is strangely reassuring, even when it is brief, and he watches blankly as she steps around him and moves toward Touya and the car.

Erik is frozen for a moment.

He doesn’t like to be touched, normally, and yesterday’s overcrowded train would have been unbearable had he not been beaten down by the hours upon hours in transit. Even in the course of his usual activities he uses his other senses more extensively; he goes out into the world to find the information that he needs. He listens to what people say, and he watches the minute shifts and movements of faces and bodies. Sometimes he speaks, but only to ask the important questions.

He trusts his memory, trusts the logic of the facts he’s put together, to fill in the gaps in his knowledge.

He uses his hands only when he’s left with no other choice, and he tries to be neat about it. He can go through documents with practiced ease, and rifle through books and loose pages with diligence, if not with delight.

But some days, he needs to clean the hot-copper tang of blood from his skin, and then he has to wade through the conflicted reactions in his head. He enjoys it, and he does his best to scrub all traces of color from his skin. He does what he must, because it has to be him, and sometimes it makes him laugh. Most of the time, though, it only makes him _angry_.

He has many reasons to shy away from human contact.

He doesn’t know what Kiriya knows about him, or about what he does; all he knows is whatever “contact” means, and maybe they’re about to have that conversation and maybe not. He has to find out.

He clears his throat, and turns around – and immediately blinks in surprise because he hasn’t been thinking about heights and Kiriya is still wearing tall clogs, as she had at their first meeting – but right now she’s trying her damned best to reach up for whatever Touya is holding up over his own head, and she’s failing utterly, because she just _barely_ comes up to Touya’s eyes.

Kiriya seems to be laughing and she seems to be speaking a mile a minute. There’s a twist in her mouth that looks like affection and irritation at the same time.

He doesn’t understand a word coming out of her mouth, but he can easily understand the unholy light in Touya’s eyes, and he walks over and simply plucks out what the other man is holding on to: a set of car keys?

He watches her start, suddenly, the lines around her eyes tightening with barely-suppressed laughter – but she masters herself quickly, and she walks up to him and says, “May I have those, please?”

Touya slaps one hand to his forehead, quietly, and says, in Erik’s direction, “Don’t. Bad idea.”

“Please don’t listen to him,” she says, grinning openly now, the fading sunlight illuminating the two prominent freckles on her nose. “Keys, Max-san?”

“Why are you driving and not me, or him for that matter,” Erik says.

“Because he’s not allowed to go where I’m taking you, and you have no idea how to navigate around Osaka,” is the prompt reply.

“I can read a map,” Erik says.

“You don’t get one. You shouldn’t have one. Osaka changes every day, and it is a different city by day and by night, too. Perhaps it is not as changeable as Tokyo,” and Kiriya lifts one shoulder in a languid half-shrug, “but it seems that way, sometimes. Please, give me the keys.”

“Do you at least have a license of some kind?”

“Of some kind,” is her cheerful reply. “You’re just going to have to trust me on that.” She continues to hold her hand out to him, expectant.

When Erik glances again in Touya’s direction, the man is still shaking his head – but now he looks cheerfully resigned, and he’s smirking at Kiriya.

“All right,” Erik says, not entirely reassured, and hands the keys over.

Kiriya turns to Touya and flashes a V for victory sign, and then turns that same brilliant smile back to him. “Thank you, Max-san. Now, if you don’t mind, we are already running a little late, and it just won’t do to miss the reservation I made for today.”

“Has anyone told you that you...seem to have a lot to say?” Erik says, suddenly, remembering her voice from the previous day: a torrent of words, just like now – but also a comfort, and something familiar. Because it was a language Erik spoke; because of her accent. “And forgive me my rudeness, but I can’t identify your accent.”

“No one can,” Kiriya says, laughing, and she motions him over to the passenger’s side of the car.

As he gets in on that side once again, he watches her gesture to Touya – palm down, fingers held together and flicking inward – and in other countries the gesture means _go away_ but apparently it has the opposite meaning here, because Touya is walking over to her, leaning in towards her, and he seems to be listening attentively to whatever she’s telling him. There is a slight frown on her face, a small crease between her eyebrows.

In the end, though, Touya gestures in her direction, as though doffing a hat he’s not wearing, and he walks into the cul-de-sac, and Erik watches until he turns a corner and vanishes.

“There, that’s settled.” Kiriya climbs carefully into the driver’s seat. Keys in the ignition, the rattle-purr of the engine coming to life. She’s tipped forward a little, since her wide belt is tied into a complicated square knot in the small of her back, but that doesn’t seem to impede her driving at all. She handles the car very easily, arms and shoulders falling into relaxed lines.

As they pull up at a stoplight she hums quietly for a few moments, a quick snatch of strangely lilting music, and then she’s laughing softly and glancing in his direction. “Ask me questions, Max-san. I know you’ve been wanting to,” she says. “It’s my task here, after all. I’m your contact, and to a certain extent I am the key that will open certain doors to you.”

He says the first thing that comes to mind. “You’re not from here.”

Kiriya rolls her eyes. “An astute observation, Max-san.”

He forges on, undaunted. “And that accent of yours. I’ve been in certain parts of the world, and I’ve never heard anyone speak in quite that fashion before,” and Erik takes on his own London accent, something he picked up from a year and a half of surveillance in and around the City of Westminster.

That had not exactly been the best eighteen and a half months of his life, since it had all been spent under a haze of constant rain, locked in a stultifying routine – but the intelligence he’d picked up has led him down a long and winding path and now it’s led him to Japan, to Osaka and – to this place, to this car. To a strange and charming and shrewd young woman whose blue eyes blaze with life and light.

Kiriya is silent for one more minute, quietly contemplative – but she spends that minute smiling. “I will answer that question once we are at our destination.”

“Which is where exactly?”

Instead of answering, she maneuvers the car around a series of corners, over another handful of bridges – and then pulls up in front of a sleek office building. A valet hurries in their direction as soon as she turns off the engine, and the man bows to her, once before opening her door and again when she’s standing on the pavement, fussing with her sleeves and her collar.

There is another quick exchange of murmurs, and then Kiriya is looking back in at him. “Out you get,” she says. “The sooner you’re inside, the sooner you’ll get some answers.”

“ _Some_ answers?” Erik says, and he tries to tamp down on his annoyance. There are names on a list and he needs to find the men and women attached to those names, and he needs to extract information from them and keep following the chains of evidence, the lies and subterfuge connecting one to the other, until he brings the whole tangled mess of a web down.

He can’t waste too much time on politeness, on word games, on a woman in lavender and silver and black – but he hurries after her anyway, up a set of stairs and down a long corridor. They pass several other women hurrying by, some in even more lavishly colored robes and some in sleek Western-style suits – and every last one of them bows to Kiriya.

Bowing back doesn’t seem to slow her down, however, and Erik has to hustle to keep up with her, until she finally turns one last corner, the hems of her robes fluttering in her haste, and she raps smartly at a door and gives her name to a young man in a neat pinstriped suit.

Erik follows her over the threshold and into the room itself – and there is nothing inside but a simple low table, the black wood polished to a high sheen. It looks like it’s large enough to seat ten or more people, but only two places are set: the one at the head of the table, and the one immediately to its right.

The two of them are alone in the room. There are no windows and the only way in or out is the door at his back.

Kiriya walks a slow circle around the perimeter of the room, eyes sweeping attentively over the floor and the ceiling and the walls, fingers trailing deliberately over the textured cream-colored wallpaper – and then she smiles, and sighs, and stops just short of the head of the table. She beckons to him with the same gesture she’d used on Touya earlier. “Max-san?”

“Where are we,” he asks, and he’s moving toward her – and he’s surprised when she puts her hand in his, when she catches up the hems of her robes and steps out of her clogs, white socks against blue-gray carpet.

With the clogs off, she’s _tiny_ ; he can feel his eyebrows climbing up at the differences in their heights. The top of Kiriya’s head is just barely level with his shoulders, but she doesn’t seem to be bothered at all.

She takes one of the cushions, settling back onto her heels, the motion practiced and graceful. “We are in a safe place,” she says, and she reaches for the tea service laid out on the table: delicate china trimmed with copper-colored threads, a box lacquered in black and red and gold. “A place where no one will overhear us. A place for...discretion.” She taps the two teapots on the tray with nimble fingertips. “Green tea or Earl Grey?”

Erik stares, caught off-guard, but nods and sits at the head of the table. He can’t quite manage to fold himself into the position Kiriya has naturally assumed, so he sits cross-legged instead, damn propriety. He replies, “Earl Grey, please,” and watches her pour into one of the cups, three-quarters full. And then he reaches for the other cup, the empty one, and returns the gesture. “Your tea?”

“The same,” Kiriya says, with a little bow, and there is a faint tinge of red in her freckled cheeks.

Erik does not quite have the same deftness of touch as Kiriya, and he knows that, but he doesn’t spill a drop and he politely pushes the cream and the sugar cubes in her direction. He prefers his own tea black, and he watches over the rim of his cup, attentively, as she doctors her tea: a splash of milk, two cubes of sugar. Just in case they might have to do this again – he can smooth over that part of the social niceties for her. She might appreciate the gesture.

“Food?” Kiriya offers, next, and she uncovers the lacquered box and pushes it in his direction, pointing out the contents, arranged tidily in little paper cups. “These are _mochi_ , rice cakes – the pink ones are filled with sweet bean paste, and the white ones have cream in them. The little round cakes are plain castella sponge cake, and the square ones are iced with chocolate and nuts.”

Erik blinks. “Must it all be so sweet?”

Kiriya laughs. “You’ve a good eye for the details, haven’t you? Green tea is always served unsweetened, here, and for many people taking tea for the first time, the taste is nothing like they’ve ever encountered before: bitter but aromatic. So they have to have something to balance it out. These types of sweets were what people came up with, evidently. Your first point of order on being here, on blending in: the details are everything. Keep paying attention to them. It’ll do you absolutely no good at all to stick out much more than you already do.”

He looks down into his teacup, and then up into her face, and he can’t help but be himself. “As opposed to someone who dresses like them, who acts and speaks like them, but who has eyes like _that_.”

She laughs again, harder. “Oh, good, are we going to be sparring? My favorite kind of conversation. I’ve not had one of those in a while.” Her hands flutter in her lap. “I, at least, have had the good fortune to have been here since I was – oh, I’m hardly going to talk to you about my age, am I? How so very impolite. It’s even more of a _faux pas_ in my line of work, in this place, than it is in the West.”

She’s smiling, but there is a faint edge of tension in the lines around her eyes.

“In any case, as I said, manners.” Kiriya looks serious, now, and Erik sits up straight, mirroring her as best as he can – and then she tilts her head again, and he remembers that this is what she does when she’s being curious. “I cannot presume to know what brings you here, Max-san,” she says, gently, “and I will not be expected to know how long you will be staying. But you have to know something. You have your mind, you have your eyes, and I dare say it won’t take you long to understand how things are done in this country – but you will also need an insider’s knowledge, and I happen to have that, as well as the ability to speak to you.” She refills his cup without missing a beat. “Well, at least you and I share a language. I don’t know what else you might know.”

Erik ticks them off on his fingers. “German, Polish, French, a little Russian, a little Spanish.”

“Impressive,” she says. “But, sadly, lacking. You speak no Asian languages.”

“I’ve never been out this way before,” is all he offers.

“This makes sense,” she says, wryly. “But perhaps it is an advantage, after all. There are sounds that might already be familiar to you because you have used them extensively in other languages.”

“I’m not here to become an expert in the language.”

“That is not my intention,” she says, and after she sips delicately from her cup and peers into the bottom, Erik offers her the teapot – and he pours for her again when she nods, though he still doesn’t make a move toward the cream and sugar. “I only want you to understand the very basic rules, so that you might be able to communicate. A little more than what the average tourist might be able to say, and nowhere near enough to be fluent – we might not have enough time for anything else.”

Erik nods. “That sounds fair,” he says. “You wish me to have some kind of phrasebook.”

“I will be your phrasebook, for the time being,” she says, “and as to the matter of my accent – you see I do not forget these things – you will not mind if I abridge it?”

He does mind, actually, because she’s not even hiding the fact that there must be some kind of story behind it – but he of all people can understand reticence, and he offers her a hint of a shrug, one shoulder hitching fractionally.

The smile she turns on him seems far too bright for what little he’s offered her. “Thank you,” she says. “Peripatetic childhood; I’ve traveled, a bit, and I’ve always had a gift for accents. The strongest ones were the ones I was immersed in, naturally, and I picked up an Oxonian accent from my mother, a New York accent from. Er.” The blush returns, full force.

Erik almost expects her to hide her face in her sleeve; he’s already familiar with that gesture of hers. But no – she looks up and meets his eyes, though she still looks tense, as though something inside her is unraveling and she’s doing her best to catch up the thread. “My mother’s husband. And then coming here, learning the language, I picked up the accents of the people who trained me, and learned how to speak in my friends’ accents because it was amusing, and because it was useful.”

Useful to her, perhaps; none of it is helpful to him. But Erik can see the tremors in her hands, and he has to let the subject go. He offers her something of himself: “I see that’s something we have in common, at least, though I didn’t start going around the world until I was sixteen.”

“Did anything in particular happen then?”

Erik smiles, and shakes his head.

Kiriya nods in understanding, and after a moment she spears one of the sweets with a wooden pick, offering it to him in its paper cup. “Try that, at least,” she says. “You can’t tell me you’ve managed to eat anything since you got here.”

He starts, then, and only notices the minute shaking in his own hand when he reaches for hers. “I...no,” he says. “The last time I ate anything I was on the plane.”

She mutters something that sounds decidedly rude before she _tsks_ and gets to her feet, and he watches her open the door a fraction.

The hand that is not on the doorknob is hovering near her hairpin, and he remembers the exact same gesture from their first meeting, when they’d gotten into the cab.

A quick exchange with the young man in the suit, faint whispers, and then Erik watches as Kiriya returns to him, a worried smile on her face. “You poor man, I do wish you’d said something before we came here. Do you mind waiting a little longer for a proper meal?”

“No,” Erik says. “Will you be eating with me?”

She startles him, then, when she pulls a small pocket watch out of a fold of her belt and murmurs to herself. “I might as well,” she sighs, at length. “If I eat now and have Touya-san come to the Blue Cherry with my things, I suppose I can manage to prepare for my night’s work.”

And that’s his opening. A question he’s been waiting to ask. “May I know,” he says, trying to be delicate, “what it is exactly that you do?” Belatedly he adds, “Kiriya-san.”

She laughs, softly. “Good catch. Do not forget names, next time. This is a culture where you cannot use the word _you_ lightly. It is much easier to remember names and ranks and honorifics.” She points to herself. “You have been a good student, so far, as you have been more than quite scrupulous with addressing me.”

“You set a good example.”

“It is part of my job.”

He waits patiently.

“I’m a _geiko_ ,” Kiriya says at last. “In the Western world, the general term is _geisha_. Only we of Osaka and of Kyoto call ourselves the other name. We are artists and entertainers; we sing, we dance, and we play musical instruments. But mainly we go to parties, and we converse with the guests, and we do our best to keep them amused and engaged. I have heard my Older Sister compare us to oil – we flow between the guests, who are the moving parts, and we make sure that they mingle without worry or fear.”

“Which are you?” Erik asks. His mind is already lighting up with possibilities, and he remembers her saying she could be a key for him.

Now he knows why.

She blinks at him. “I beg your pardon?”

“Do you dance, do you sing, do you play musical instruments,” he says. “Please clarify.”

“Oh! How silly of me.” Kiriya reaches into her belt, again, and this time she draws out a folding fan. She handles it with a kind of respect, and he feels a little wrong-footed, until she smiles and gets to her feet and snaps the fan open – ink on pale green paper, a landscape of sand and shore. “I dance,” she says, and she holds the fan up to her face and then gestures with her free hand, fingers flickering in a rapid movement.

Erik has no idea if it even means anything, and he wonders how he’d missed it, earlier – the way she moves, the way she carries herself, even in mundane situations such as walking down a corridor, such as driving a car: _grace_ , he thinks. Harmony of movement, ease of gesture, delicacy and strength all at once.

“You’re remarkable,” he says at last.

Kiriya smiles, and closes her fan, and suddenly her languid movements become something more forceful – she’s holding the fan as though it were a weapon, and her hand is still beautifully placed around the dark gray wood, fingers curved just so.

He almost draws his knife, wanting to show respect in the only way he understands, but there is a knock on the door, and Kiriya throws it open this time, to admit a pair of girls in striped robes. They are carrying plain black lacquered boxes, different from the one already on the table.

Kiriya nods and gestures with her fan, and the girls follow her unspoken instructions. One of them leaves a set of cutlery, wrapped in a pristine pale-blue napkin, at Erik’s right hand.

When they’re finished, the girls bow to Kiriya deeply, from the waist, and she locks the door behind them.

As she comes back to the table Erik copies her motions from earlier – he opens one of the lacquered boxes, puts the cover neatly away, and pushes it towards her with both hands. “Will you join me, please.”

“With an invitation like that,” she laughs, “how can I resist?”

He struggles with the chopsticks until he thinks of them as weapons.

///

_Three: Charles_

Charles knows he’s in trouble; he might even have an idea of how deep in it he is.

He knows full well he’s going to have to sit through at least one more of Yachiru’s scoldings – and, worse, that she’s going to be needling him mercilessly, affectionately, for a good long time yet.

That is what Older Sisters are for, after all. Yachiru is a source of useful information and, on occasion, fashion advice. He’s lost count of the many times he’s relied on her wisdom when he’s committed a _faux pas_ or encountered an entirely new or strange situation, and there seems to be no shortage of those in his strange life.

She’s also fond of talking nonsense at him, especially when it’s well past midnight and the last guests have been ushered to their hired cars or, in the case of those who were too drunk to walk, half-carried out, with the assistance of various amused _otokoshi_ , including at least one of Touya’s younger brothers.

“You’re a romantic, Kiriya,” she says. “And I tell you and I tell you, romance is a good thing, but you really shouldn’t be running around looking for it.”

Charles laughs, a little more loudly than he usually would, if only because he’s drunk more than his share of sake at tonight’s parties. The difference between him and her is that while he can still manage to walk in a straight line, Yachiru is literally going around in circles, and in the end he takes her hands in a firm grip and starts pulling her in the direction of her apartment.

Up the stairs, and he has to blush and ask for the maid’s help in getting his Older Sister into her room. As he’s helping her take off her wig and her kimono, Yachiru blinks, and catches him by his wrist. “Are we safe?” she asks, urgently.

“You were not aware I had guided you home?” Charles asks. “We are in your apartment.”

That gets him a half-drunken smile. “Oh. Thank you. We’re safe. Charles.” She catches both of his hands in hers. “You have to tell me you’re all right. You have to tell me you’re happy.”

He blinks. “Yachiru-san. Do I not seem all right to you? Whatever gave you the impression there was something wrong?”

“What you do,” she says, and she tries her best to look him in the eyes. “Helping that man out.”

Charles shrugs gracelessly. “I’m afraid I haven’t even been of much assistance to Max-san; he is already carrying on his investigations by himself. It’s been some weeks since I last heard from him. The most I can do for him is provide names and addresses and directions, give him letters of introduction, and perhaps translate a phrase or two,” Charles murmurs, and he lets himself feel that he’s worried for the man, that he’s often afraid for him, and that he sometimes lights incense and says a little prayer at the household shrine, for Max’s sake. “Won’t you lie down?”

“Let me finish.” She clutches at his hands. “Charles. Dearest. Please, promise me you’ll be careful.”

“I rather thought you’d take a different tack – I thought you’d tell me to leave him alone. Because...he won’t be here for long. Because he’s _gaijin_. Because you and I know quite well that he’s not exactly on the side of the angels.”

“What are you talking about? _No_ , Charles,” Yachiru snaps, and there is a surprising force in her voice, a strange conviction in her eyes. “No to all of that. Especially the last part. How can you say he’s not fighting for justice? I know you know about his list. I know you know why there’s a list in the first place.”

“He’s fighting _a_ fight,” he says, and this time, when he maneuvers his Older Sister in the direction of her quilts, she goes willingly. “I’m just not sure it’s _the_ good fight.”

“That is not for you to decide, and neither do you have any control over his fate. And knowing this, you help him anyway,” Yachiru murmurs as she lets her hair down, silver strands threaded into the rich lustrous black. “A noble thing, but have you figured out why?”

Charles is silent for a long moment, and then he says, “No.”

“I hope you do, soon. Think about it, my dear Charles, won’t you, for the sake of my heart, and especially for yours,” she says, and she presses her warm hand to his knee, affectionate and reassuring. “For the sake of the many truths you carry around in your heart, and for the truths that man must be hiding, as well.”

A moment later, she’s asleep. Charles shakes his head and chuckles softly – typical of her to be so forthright – but he makes sure to tuck her securely into her quilts before he leaves, and he kisses her forehead and murmurs, “Sleep well, my sister.”

He puts his hand over his heart as he leaves her apartment, and his thoughts are awhirl, like cherry blossoms on a capricious spring breeze. He thinks of Max, and he thinks of himself, of the names Kiriya and Charles, and he thinks of Yachiru and of Touya.

Osaka glitters in an especially melancholy way as he turns the last corner before home – and on an impulse he walks past the seashell-shaped gate, and turns the corner, heading in the direction of the house called Iwakura, where Touya keeps the car. He has a duplicate of the keys, and tomorrow he doesn’t have any engagements scheduled yet.

He’s almost at the car when he hears the footsteps.

Someone is walking after him. Someone is following him, here.

He risks a quick look over his shoulder, and he sees the three men threading the path in his direction.

Charles takes a deep breath and hurries on, clack-clack of his clogs echoing in the alleyway, heavy robes swirling around his ankles.

Past the car, and on to Iwakura – he bangs on the outer gate four times. It’s not the most reliable of signals, and for all he knows there may be no one in the house or they’re all asleep, but at least he can tell Touya the simple truth: that he did attempt to let them know, as best as he could. Or at least that’s what he’s going to say, if he manages to get out of this one.

He can hear his own breath catching in his chest. He can feel the trembling in his fingertips, but he pushes that thought away. He knows how to control his own body, how to control the movements of his muscles. He knows his own adrenaline rush as intimately as he knows the steps to _Gion Kouta_. He knows his own reactions inside-out, because he’s been dancing for years; he knows what it’s like to wait on stage, holding a pose, counting the last few seconds before curtain as they tick down.

Inhale. Exhale. Around the next corner. Be within sight of a friendly door, be near a well-lit place.

And – show time.

With his right hand, Charles reaches for his steel hairpin; he carefully pulls it out of his wig as though he were drawing a sword from its sheath. He winds most of his right sleeve up around his forearm.

He can’t do anything for the long trailing hems of his kimono, but he knows what to do with them and with the dangling left sleeve in a situation like this, fortunately or unfortunately enough.

“Good evenin’,” someone drawls behind him. He’s heard that voice before. It belongs to a man he’s been watching for a long time now, a man who is suspected of various white collar crimes. Charles refuses to attend engagements which the man will be at; he and Yachiru have heard too many stories of the man’s lecherous behavior.

Charles sincerely hopes he doesn’t kill the man, not tonight, because he’s not yet finished with the investigation, and he has yet to figure out why all the information he’s gathering is leading in an old, well-known, wearying direction – towards Marko Technologies.

Towards his past.

He turns around slowly. Reflected light from the hairpin lets him see the man’s face, the faces of his two bodyguards.

“You’re that stuck-up _geiko_ I’ve been askin’ after,” the man says. “You and your Older Sister, what’s her name, Yachi-something? – you both think you’re too good to come to my parties.”

“My apologies, honored sir,” Charles murmurs. There is a half-smile frozen on his face. He can be polite, but he cannot give the man the satisfaction of looking him in the eyes. “It is an unfortunate circumstance that we are always summoned away before we can see you.”

The man tries to grin, but the expression looks more like a twisted parody of a grimace. “Thought you were all about being nice to people like us – you wouldn’t survive a day on the streets if we didn’t go here!”

Charles merely shakes his head, a minuscule movement, dismissing the statement as easily as breathing.

He remembers a little boy sleeping beneath well-kept shrubbery, waking up at every noise; he remembers trying to sneak into public washrooms so he could splash water on his hands and face; he remembers trying to find places that sold books in the English language. A boy who spent a week wandering bridges and asking for help before he could accept the truth.

A stranded boy. Lost in another country, another culture, another language. Everything strange and frightening. _Adrift._

No one but Yachiru knows.

And this man is certainly not going to be hearing that tale.

So Charles braces himself, clutches his hairpin in a defensive position, and keeps watching his assailant out of the corners of his eyes. He’s tensed, and ready. Waiting.

“Get her,” the man snaps, and one of the bodyguards steps forward. He looks slightly apologetic.

Charles smiles – and as soon as the man’s within range, he whirls _forward_. Left hand out and held as rigidly as an axe-blade, fingers pressed tightly together. He chops at the bodyguard’s throat with the sides of his hand, two strikes in rapid succession; he lands a blow with his palm, loud _crack_ across his opponent’s cheekbone. The man grunts and moves to shield himself, hand rising to cover the side of his face, and Charles moves in, steps delicately around him, twisting just enough so that he’s now in the man’s blind spot, around him, and he finishes him off with a decisive, powerful smash to the back of the neck.

The bodyguard groans quietly, and then collapses to the pavement at Charles’s clogs.

Charles can’t smile, yet, though, because the obnoxious man is red in the face and he’s all but whistling like a kettle on the boil, and when he does order his other bodyguard forward he sounds furious, and strangled besides. “You can’t tell me you’re scared of her – she’s just a _geiko_!”

The second bodyguard comes in with his fists raised, covering his face, and Charles smiles and flourishes his hairpin, once. “Are you sure you want to dance with someone like me,” he murmurs, in English, and the man pulls up short, lowers his fists a fraction.

Charles takes the opening; he slashes viciously at what’s exposed of the man’s face – and he draws blood on the second strike, the sharp steel slicing at the man’s knuckles. Charles whirls gracefully, hopes he hasn’t stained his robes, and closes in again, wrist fluttering in a precise movement – and this one opens a second wound across the backs of the man’s hands.

The bodyguard screeches, tries to throw a punch – Charles dodges him easily, kimono hems flying with every short, contained motion.

Fighting for Charles is just another kind of dance – and he’s been dancing for a long time, almost since he came to Osaka. Years of learning how to move, how to perfect his posture, how to carry his arms and shoulders, how to place his feet. How to turn and to dip and to _flow_ , learning how to sing the songs so that he can better understand the music and the rhythm, and dance better as a result. In his robes and in casual dress, on a vast stage and in an intimate tearoom: the dance is what rules his head and his heart; the dance is in his blood.

And so Charles dances – he fights, moving fluidly, and the hairpin and his sleeve are his props and his weapons.

After he wounds the bodyguard a third time by opening a long gash on the thug’s neck, Charles shifts his grip on the hairpin, backhanded now, ready for the thrust. He steps forward, he lashes out, and when he comes to a stop the man is muffling his shrieks of pain in his hands, and blood is gushing from a deep wound in his forearm.

Is it a pity or a blessing that he missed the man’s wrist? Charles has no time to feel unsure as he watches that bodyguard suddenly turn tail and run; he looks quickly over his shoulder, checking for the location of the obnoxious man.

There is a breath on the back of his neck, and Charles snaps to attention, body going rigid.

“Get away from me,” he shouts – and he lets fly a strike, but blindly, and he can feel the man at his back dodging him. Charles hisses in rage and in fear, and he closes his eyes and he whirls and flows, forward, fight, defend!

A hand – large and warm and inexplicably gentle – catches his wrist, deftly.

A voice threaded with surprise and fear and something else is speaking to him.

“...Can you hear me? Kiriya-san?”

Charles pulls up short. He wrenches his hand away from the other’s grip, and spins around.

When he opens his eyes, and blinks, Max is still standing right in front of him, and he still looks shocked and concerned and confused all at the same time.

And Charles is still holding his hairpin to Max’s throat, barely a hair’s-breadth away from nicking the skin. Red blood on the prongs. “You’ve been there all this time?”

“No; I arrived as you scared off the other thug. And then that other man was closing in on you, so I stepped in to, ah, _assist_. Please excuse me.” Max raises both of his hands slowly, carefully. He isn’t blinking, and he isn’t making any sudden movements. He says, gently, “Perhaps a truce is in order?”

Charles draws in a breath – and he pulls his hand away, and he steps back from Max, and he just barely remembers to address him politely. “I...must admit I wasn’t expecting to see you here, Max-san.”

“And I was not expecting you to still be here, considering the lateness of the hour – nor doing what you were doing, to tell the truth,” Max says. “I was...continuing my investigations, and by the time I had noticed that it was late, I was already in this area. I was on my way to the place that you mentioned, the Blue Cherry, but only for a social call, nothing more.”

“I’m sure,” Charles says, faintly. “I hope your work is bearing fruit, at the very least.”

“Perhaps. What I have right now is inconclusive, and there are still many leads to follow. I may well be asking you for your help again, and soon. As to this...there must be some kind of explanation?” Max asks, and he hooks his thumb over his shoulder.

Charles peers around him – and he suddenly wants to laugh, loudly and hysterically, because the obnoxious man is sprawled out on the street. He’s still breathing, but he’s out cold, and he’s been tied up with his suit jacket, and he looks absolutely ludicrous and powerless. Before Charles realizes it, he is turning away from Max and giggling quietly into his left sleeve.

There’s a sharp short sound from nearby, and Charles looks up, worry flaring up in the back of his mind.

But Max is red-faced even in the bad light and his shoulders are shaking, and he, too, is huffing with laughter.

There will be questions enough later, and it’s going to be a job trying to talk around what just happened. Right now it is enough to perceive that the situation has been careening around wildly, from danger to absurdity, and now he has the unexpected blessing of someone who understands, someone to laugh with.

Charles presses both hands over his mouth and lets the laughter bubble up, lets the sheer _relief_ wash over him, until he’s doubled over, until he’s breathless, until he’s laughing so hard that he’s crying at the same time. “Stop, stop,” he sputters, breath hitching over the words until he can’t remember which language he’s using. He’s reaching out for Max; he’s trying to stay upright. “Please make it stop, it hurts to laugh!”

[](http://fav.me/d56ze7y)

  


But when the spasm of mirth and leftover adrenaline dissipates, Max is once again looking seriously at him.

Charles looks down, and sighs. His robes are so heavy and he’s so tired – he’d sink down to the pavement if he could. He sways, and looks away from the wounded and from the unconscious, and he starts walking. Anywhere. Home. The car, perhaps. He just needs to turn the corner.

He pulls a cloth from his left sleeve and wipes his hairpin clean, and he doesn’t trust himself to replace it properly in his wig so he tucks it into his obi instead.

There’s a shadow walking at his side, a presence that is a stranger to him and yet oddly familiar, and Charles only just has enough of his wits left to murmur, “And what of those...men?”

“Men – they are not even men, but animals, _swine_ , are they not?” Max says, and Charles thinks he’s not imagining the note of derision in the man’s voice. “Why are you concerned?”

“People might wonder what happened,” he says, mildly.

“Let them. From what I gathered of that pig of a man, he’s not exactly welcome here.”

“He isn’t,” Charles concedes. “He’s a bit rude, a bit condescending, a bit too over-familiar. He does not settle his obligations easily. And he wonders why he is not popular here, or at least liked?”

“So the police can come and pick him up. He can be someone else’s problem. Let other people wonder what happened to him and to his...companions,” Max mutters, rebelliously.

Charles shakes his head ruefully, and detours to the nearest police box, Max shadowing him from a discreet distance – but when he gives his name and the name of the obnoxious man, the policeman sitting at the little desk smiles, and holds up a hand, and says, “We’ll take care of that, Kiriya-san.”

“Someone else complained about him?”

“Everyone has complained about him in one way or another.”

Charles gives the policeman a strained little smile as he asks them to send the men to hospital, and he bows as he takes his leave – and the officer bows back, deeply.

This time when they get to the car he passes the keys to Max. “I sincerely hope you were not joking when you said you could drive, Max-san,” he murmurs, half-complaining, as he settles into the passenger seat. “I’d do it, but I’d probably crash the car – I’m so very tired.”

“Let’s find out if I can manage to get us back to Takarazuka in one piece,” Max says. He doesn’t stumble over the name of the city. “Will you be able to stay awake long enough to give me directions?”

“Yes,” Charles says.

“Then let’s be off.”

*

Charles’s room, in the Takarazuka house, is directly across the corridor from Max’s. He’s going to have to be careful, he’s going to have to be just a little more discreet than he already is, but this is nothing he hasn’t done before, and he really is smiling and grateful when he stops right next to his sliding doors and bows. “Thank you for your hard work this night,” Charles murmurs. “I...I appreciate it very much.”

Max inclines his head in return. “And I appreciate your grace under fire, as well as your magnificent fighting skills. Where did you learn how to fight like that?”

“I am a dancer,” Charles says, because it is the truth. “I have been dancing for such a long time now. Learning to fight is merely a sideways step away.”

“Are you...in danger, in Osaka?”

“I? No,” Charles says, and he lets a little sharpness edge into the whispered words. “But as for the other task that I have taken upon myself – well, for that one ought to be a little more prudent, don’t you think?”

Max nods. “I agree,” he says, and then he smiles. “I don’t want to keep you from your rest.”

Charles bows to him again, because there is nothing else to say in response except “Sleep well,” and it is only when Erik has stepped into his room and turned out his lights that Charles breathes out a sigh of relief.

It’s a struggle to get out of his robes even on a normal night; but he’d never be so crass as to wake up Touya for this, no matter how the _otokoshi_ has tried to tell him something like: “This is my job, Kiriya-san, your kimono are basically my responsibility and my _life_. Also, I find it amusing to be nearby when your Older Sister decides to scold you about the way you keep your things.”

Yachiru likes to make fun of him, but they both know it’s empty jest, or on occasion a needed reminder; he manages to be quite meticulous even now, when every movement calls up a fresh throb of pain in every muscle. His shoulders and ribs ache like fury, and not just from carrying the immense weight of his kimono and obi. But he takes the time to hang up his clothes properly, to take off his wig and makeup – and then he groans softly, as he sinks into his quilts.

Sleep comes for him instantly.

Charles dreams of a man in braces and a crisp white shirt and an undone bow tie, glasses perched on his nose, hands stained with ink and covered with paper cuts. He used to smile, this man, and then there was a long time that he was gone and then when he came back he was no longer the same. Charles still hears the booming report of a pistol shot in his nightmares sometimes – just one, but only one had been needed, because it had not missed.

Charles dreams of a frail woman, beautiful and pale and elegant, and who was never anything less than kind. She was always gentle and sweetly-spoken, but so weak, and so alone in the world. In Charles’s memories, the sharp piercing smell of antiseptics clings to her: it comes out of her skin and it comes from her beautiful clothes, the languid dresses she was in the habit of wearing, until the very moment that she had to give them up for the indignity and insult of a hospital gown.

Charles dreams of a huge man with his features twisted into a permanent rictus of disdain. Flashy rings on his stubby fingers, a well-trimmed goatee that only seemed to cheapen every smile and every word that came out of his too-large mouth. Watery pale blue eyes and thinning black hair, and a voice that could boom out hearty falsehoods, and that lapsed into sullen silence if it was the truth that needed to be spoken.

No. Forget that. Another family in another life.

Charles remembers standing up in a small courtroom, summer sun and cloudless sky through the windows as he trembled before a judge but spoke loudly and clearly, saying he wished to be part of a new family. He remembers kneeling on mats in his best robes, five embroidered crests standing out against black silk; his hands folded neatly in his lap, waiting to drink three sips of _sake_ from three nested cups, though he had started to think of Yachiru as his Older Sister almost from the moment they’d met.

[](http://fav.me/d56ze5k)

He dreams of danger and of deceit and of the constant need to _listen_. He dreams of secrets stolen and passed along, and of messages in strange ciphers; he remembers the long hours spent learning how to speak certain languages and how to fight and how to drive.

Beneath it all, beneath the music and the rhythm and the rapidfire banter of the parties, beneath the bruises and every single time he’d escaped discovery or capture by the barest skin of his teeth – beneath that, Charles dreams of a little boy in knee-length trousers and a white shirt. The boy is reaching out to his reflection in a mirror. The reflection wears pretty robes and long hair. He is at the same time both of them, the boy and the image. Blue eyes freighted with tears, with secrets, with memories.

When he wakes up, the world outside his windows is hidden in the roaring rush of the pouring rain. He’s cold, and there are tear-tracks dried stiff on his cheeks, tight lines leading past his temples and into his hair.

There is a newly-arrived message on his dresser. Pale cream paper, a familiar initial in the corner, though the person who inscribed the paper is not the same as the person who wrote the message: his allies, his companions into danger.

His unsettled dreams evaporate before the reality of those words.

He’s holding a message from his friends.

_Arima Onsen, soon. Within the next week. We must meet. Bring your contact. e/j_

He hesitates, but just for a moment – then he takes a pen from the cup next to the tray of writing brushes and dashes off a response. _I hope you’re sure this is safe. We are going out on quite the limb. On the other hand, faint heart and all that. I will bring him to you as soon as I can._

He dips into a drawer for more paper: now he has messages of his own to write. To his Older Sister he writes, _Please be so kind as to make my excuses for the next few nights. I shall do my best to return as soon as I can. And yes, I am well aware that I will owe you. Wish me luck._

To Touya, a shorter message: _Traveling to Kobe. Take care of things for me. Make sure my Older Sister gets home safely._

He has to smile when he sees one of the robes he has tucked away in a chest in the corner of this room. He doesn’t remember bringing it here, but it is a relief to see it, and it is more of a relief to know that he can manage to put it on all by himself.

A quick bath, a quick soak; he pins his hair up very carefully, and he curses under his breath because it still hasn’t quite gotten long enough to tie back neatly into one single tail. He puts on a little makeup: just a touch of color around the eyes.

The kimono is one of his favorites: dark blue-gray, with tiny star-shaped flowers outlined in white and silver scattered around the hems. The obi is similarly understated, pale gold and white with a knot of black braid. He tucks his bladed hairpin into his sleeve.

Max is waiting for him in the kitchen.

“Good morning,” Charles murmurs.

“Kiriya-san. Good morning,” Max says in Japanese, and he even manages a fair attempt at Charles’s Osaka accent. But then he clears his throat and switches back to English. “I need your help.”

“I know,” Charles says, and he smiles when that makes Max raise an eyebrow at him. “Those people you are looking for. One of them, at the very least, will soon be in Kobe. Yes?”

Max nods, once, curtly. “How do you know this?”

“I have set my own informants on the trail,” Charles says. “You see, now you and I are acting in concert. You have your sources here, and I have mine, and now it is time to bring them all together.”

“Yes.”

“Then I will act as the key on your behalf, and help you with what you will need to do there.” Charles pours the tea for them both. “And if you don’t mind the question, perhaps it’s time you explained some things to me, so I can do a better job of assisting you?” He holds up a hand in warning. “Please understand. I do not wish you to tell me everything. Just tell me what you think I should know, and I will do what I can. I only wish to narrow the scope of the search, if it were possible. Will that arrangement suit you?”

Max nods, at last, after a long moment. “Of course.”

“It’s nothing,” Charles says, and he allows himself to touch Max, just on his wrist, fingertips pressed warmly and briefly, and then pulling away. He wants to reassure him, to let him know he’s not alone, and he can’t really say why – so he hides it behind the veneer of his profession. “It’s as I said when I met you. You look like you need help, help that I can provide. I just want to know what else you might require.”

He watches as Max seems to come to a decision, as he nods and attempts to smile. “I am very grateful for all of your hard work, Kiriya-san.”

Charles spreads his hands. “I am merely doing my job.”

“And I have never had a better guide.” Max looks away, seemingly embarrassed, but when he looks at Charles again there is nothing but sincerity in his expression.

It warms Charles, inexplicably, and he smiles at him, just a little. “I will make arrangements so that you and I can speak of this in private, and so that you can meet some of my confederates.”

“I’d like that,” Max says, and he makes as if to leave – but then he stops at the door, and turns back partway. “Once again, thank you.”

Charles nods to him. “I will see you shortly, Max-san.”

///

_Four: Erik_

This time, when he follows Kiriya into the room with the low table, Erik knows better. They are in the heart of Osaka and the building is designed expressly for all kinds of private meetings. The _geiko_ is a frequent guest; in the daytime, she may meet a client for an intimate, relaxed conversation, or join a group of businesswomen and diplomats’ wives for language lessons.

“This is a secure place,” she murmurs as they walk down the corridor. “We can speak a little more freely here than if we were someplace else.”

“This does not mean that there have been no problems.”

“You are right, of course, but at least I know this particular place very well, and I can protect you and the others whom I meet here.”

“I don’t doubt that at all, Kiriya-san.”

Two women are sitting in the room when they enter – and they, too, bow deeply to Kiriya once she joins them, and she laughs as she returns their greetings.

Erik stares at them, nonplussed, as he again takes the seat at the head of the table. The two newcomers are on his left, seated comfortably side by side. The red-haired woman seems younger, and she huddles in on herself a little, but he thinks he can’t underestimate her, not when her dark green eyes are filled with pride and the easy spark of competence.

He’s not sure if he wants to know what she knows, what she can do.

On the other hand, the blonde is already familiar to him, though he doesn’t know if he can explore the connection here. Some of the information he’s received from Langley he’s traced back to her, and if it doesn’t allow him to pinpoint what she does exactly, it allows him to have a few ideas. Perhaps some kind of adventurer – debatable, that. She may very well be an actual fellow operative, on long-term assignment to a series of cases instead of to a specific area. Her white blouse is a crisp, stark contrast to the table and to her companion’s dark green dress.

The table only has the tea service this time, and Kiriya pours into two cups. To one she adds a paper-thin slice of lemon and a sugar cube; to the other, two teaspoons of milk and two sugar cubes. “Ladies,” she murmurs, and pushes the cups over.

When Kiriya turns in his direction Erik inclines his head to her in acquiescence, and he soaks in her quiet laugh, and out of the corner of his eye he sees the redhead smile and duck her head, while the blonde smirks into her teacup.

He pours Kiriya a cup in turn and pours in the right amount of milk and sugar, and there’s a soft look in her eyes, and he tucks the memory of it away in the back of his mind.

“Introductions,” the _geiko_ murmurs after a few moments. “Jean-san, Emma-san, may I present Max Eisenhardt; Max-san, these are Jean Grey and Emma Frost.”

“I’ve seen you before,” Emma says, tossing back her blonde hair, and that confirms Erik’s suspicions. “Langley, right?”

He shrugs. “I’m not sure if you’re cleared high enough for me to comment on that.”

“Oh please,” she says, laughing, but not unkindly. “MacTaggert told me a little about you, Eisenhardt.”

That tells him exactly what Moira’s told her. Erik nods in understanding. “So you’re working with them for now?”

“For now,” and Emma smiles.

“Is this proper?” Jean murmurs.

“It is,” Kiriya says. “As I have just been explaining to Max-san, you really shouldn’t be worried about being here.”

“Oh, all right, excuse me then. I’m with the Home Office,” Jean says. “Her Majesty’s Government?”

“Why are you telling me these things?” Erik asks.

“So you’ll be willing to work with us, what do you think,” Emma says. “Speaking for myself, I know when I’m about to be beat, and that’s just about the time when I’ve run up against a problem that I cannot solve on my own. The situation is that I found several problems that need solving all at once, so I figured it was time to do the sensible thing and ask for help.”

Erik watches as she puts her cup down, watches her point to the other two women in turn. “I’ve got dirt she’s looking for,” and she pointed to Jean. “And the other problem I found has to do with a favor that she requested from me,” and she pointed to Kiriya. “So who is going to help me solve my problem, the original problem that brought me to Osaka in the first place?”

“You expect that the answer to that question is...me,” Erik drawls, and taps his index finger against his chest.

“I know I can count on their help,” Emma says. “But as I’ve just explained, we can’t do it by ourselves. As for you – I can expect, and maybe I can even hope – but who knows what it’ll take to get you to believe me.”

Erik thinks that over for a moment, and then he turns to the woman on his right. “Kiriya-san?”

“Max-san,” is the serene, smiling reply.

“I will trust them if you vouch for them.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Jean shake her head.

Kiriya holds his gaze, unflinching – and there is a spark in her blue eyes that looks like conviction. “I have already entrusted my own life to their entirely capable hands. Several times, in fact. That I am only scarred from previous...missions is because of them, because they have put their lives on the line for me, allowing me to complete the work and get out alive.”

“Too modest, Kiriya-san, as always,” Jean murmurs. “There are places only you can go and only you can come out of. And you have also saved each of us more times than I’d care to recall right now.”

“Same goes for you, Jean,” Emma says, and Erik watches the blonde put a hand on the redhead’s shoulder. “Need I remind the table at large – well, aside from Mister Newcomer, here – that this is hardly the first time we’ve had to do something like this.”

Jean pantomimes a shudder, and she laughs quietly, a hand over her mouth. “Oh dear lord please no. I’m still technically in the red from the last time.”

Kiriya smiles, but then she whips a smaller folding fan from her sleeve and raps it once on the table. The sharp echo of it bounces around the room.

Erik wonders exactly what stories these three women might have to tell. But his mind is made up, and so he bows to Kiriya, holds it for a few seconds, until the rustle of her robes tells him she’s returning the gesture.

Well, that and the fact that she’s reaching out to him again, her pale fingertips against the back of his hand. He’s surprised at how quickly he’s adapted to this gesture of hers – and in the back of his mind, he wonders why he welcomes that particular touch. Hers alone, and no one else’s.

Erik smiles at her, a thin sliver like the fine edge on his knife, and it is only after he turns back to the other two that he pulls his hand away from Kiriya’s. “I am assuming,” he says, “that you want to know what my mission is, so you can brief me on how your tasks tie in.”

“We only need to know the basics, we can figure out the rest,” Emma says carelessly.

Erik consults the list in his memory. Since coming to Osaka, he’s managed to eliminate two more names – one was an alias, the other was a patsy.

That leaves him with a drastically shortened list – but the most prominent name, the one he came expressly to Japan for, is the one that remains unaccounted for. He knows very little about the person and he needs to know everything, as soon as he can.

“Very well then. My mission at present is this. What do you know about Yashida Mariko?”

Emma is the first to react, and she lets out a long, low whistle. “The last time I spoke with MacTaggert I figured out that she’d sent _someone_ after the big fish here...I’d no idea they were after _that_ one.”

Jean is shaking her head and chuckling nervously. “Well, that just means we’ll have to reclassify this particular mission,” she says, and pretends to write on the polished table. “ _In the event of my untimely death, which perhaps will not even come to light until it is far too late to do anything..._ ”

“Max-san.” This time, when he glances at Kiriya, it’s a shock – he’s seen her amused and worried and sarcastic and imperious, but he’s never seen her look actually nervous before. “Max-san, are you absolutely sure that is the name of the person you are...hunting, here?”

“Yes.” He doesn’t want to see her like this, but this is his mission, and this is what he came here for. “I’m afraid it is, Kiriya-san.”

“Don’t – I mean, please don’t apologize. I just wanted to make sure.”

“I am.”

“Then you’ll have all the support I can give you.” Kiriya takes a deep breath, and sits up straight. The apprehension in her eyes is gone as quickly as it had appeared there. “Emma-san, Jean-san, I will be the point of the spear, if you’ll have me.”

“Did I just hear you volunteer for this? You’re going to help him go after _Yashida_?” Emma asks, and she sounds incredulous. “You’ll excuse me for being indelicate, Kiriya-san. I know you have that streak of recklessness in you, and frankly I admire you for it, you wouldn’t be quite the dancer or the fighter otherwise. But this is...well, this is too much.”

“No more than when you decided you’d take on the Creeds, inside the Arctic Circle, with no hope of backup, Emma,” Jean murmurs. “You know how well that one turned out.” He watches her turn to the _geiko_ , eyes flinty and determined. “And for what it’s worth, Kiriya-san, my opinion is, we won’t survive this particular mission if anyone else were leading us. It has to be you, and I’m very glad you volunteered.”

“Whose side are you on anyway,” Emma mutters, but she sounds resigned, now, and she’s turning back toward him. “All right, Eisenhardt, I’m in, too. But I’m doing this for her and not for you, just so we’re clear.”

“I expected nothing less.” Erik nods, once. “Now that that’s all settled. As I was saying: Yashida Mariko. Everyone here knows about her, I’m assuming, from your reactions.” He waits for them to nod. “Head of the Shingen crime family, and you of all people might actually know the story of how she got there. Not _from_ the family per se, that’s pretty obvious, but basically the throne is hers, am I correct?”

“She’s been in charge for about three years now,” Jean murmurs. “Our sources tell us she’s nearing the end of the consolidation process; she’s managed to win almost all of the factions of the family over, and there are only just a handful of groups that are still actively resisting.”

“And not a drop of mercy in her either,” Emma adds, “nor in her underlings. I could almost admire the sheer pure ruthlessness she’s bringing to bear on those idiots still holding out against her. Are you also going to attempt to go after her – for lack of a better term – _consigliere_?”

“If I can,” Erik says.

Kiriya coughs quietly. “I am not familiar with that word.”

Erik almost wants to reach out to her; this is the first time he’s heard her say anything like that. “Technically her second-in-command,” he explains, instead, “because she doesn’t bother to have an underboss. The closest adviser, but not the lieutenant. Goes by one name only; the name we know is Yukio.”

“My Older Sister and I met her some eighteen months ago.” Kiriya’s eyes flicker closed as she thinks. “Cold eyes and a fine social smile. She out-drank everyone at the party, and she had no problems with walking away, when it was done. We were engaged only for conversation, however, and only about the topics she presented to us.”

“She didn’t say anything about the Shingen,” Erik says, a statement and not a question.

Kiriya nods. “It would have been folly for her to say anything, and I was under the impression she didn’t trust us in any case – or indeed enjoy herself at the gathering. We were not asked to dance, either.”

“Rude,” is Emma’s succinct assessment. “Who invites you and Yachiru-san to a party and then doesn’t ask you to dance? It’s what you _do_.”

“Yukio is merely the secondary target,” Erik says. “We are here to talk about Yashida.”

“And the information we gave Kiriya is this: she will be heading to the Arima Onsen in Kobe next week. We don’t have the numbers on her entourage yet, or if she’s meeting anyone there.”

“I assume that is the part you’ll need assistance with,” Kiriya murmurs.

“I’ll do pretty much anything and everything to get my hands on a guest list,” Emma says, and sips her tea. “You and I know how discreet, and safe, the inns in the area are. And that works both for and against us. You can’t get into many of the places there without some serious influence, not to mention reservations made well in advance.” To Erik: “Some people have to wait several months just for a prime room, or for access to the special hot springs, the ones with some kind of healing properties.”

“I see,” Erik says.

“I will do my best,” Kiriya says, and then she looks at Erik. “Max-san. Be forthright with me, if you would be so kind. What exactly do you wish us to do about Yashida?”

He looks at her for a long moment. It’s easy to tell her the truth – or at least parts of it. “I’ve been investigating a particularly nasty group of men and women scattered all over the world. A network of men and women who’ve had something to do with...the concentration camps.” He can speak about this calmly, and he watches as Emma and Jean react with surprise and then sympathy. “My task is to complete the rosters – who set up the camps, who administered them, who helped them escape. Who is supporting them now. Where the money has gone. What else they might be planning to do.

“The information I have found here in Osaka has gone a long way towards convincing me that Yashida may well be involved with at least the last two activities I just named. She may be a banker, or she may at least have the pass codes and account access information for some of the people on the list. And if she has none of those then at least she has other names for me, names that I can use to continue following the strands of the web.”

“I...see,” Kiriya says, faintly.

The other two are looking down at the table.

Erik looks at his hand and sees that it is shaking – until Kiriya takes his empty teacup and refills it, and presses his fingers into stillness around the warmed porcelain. “Thank you. Please drink that, and we will continue, when you have regained your equilibrium.”

He sips his tea slowly, carefully, deliberately, and when he sets the cup down at last he’s almost back to himself.

Emma is still eyeing him warily. Jean is looking at him with something like sympathy in her eyes.

Kiriya simply meets his gaze head-on, gentle and yet at the same time strong, and her fearlessness pulls at something in him and he realizes that this is a tether he can use to get back to himself. He closes his eyes, holds the image of her in his mind, and then takes one deep breath and then another.

When he opens his eyes she has moved to the left side of the table and begun conferring with the other two women. The three speak quickly and succinctly, a rapidfire exchange of questions and answers, logistics and infiltration and tactics.

They all sound like they’re old hands at what they do, and he finds himself thinking out loud, “And to think that there are many armies in this world that will not admit women to their ranks. Their loss. You three sound like you’ve been through the wars and back.”

Emma rolls her eyes, and Jean smiles and drums her fingers on the table.

Kiriya taps him on his shoulder with her folding fan, and when he looks up to her face, she seems both kind and knowing. “Thank you for the excellent compliment. Especially coming from a seasoned campaigner such as you, yes? Now come and help us – we were rather hoping you would be an integral part of these plans.”

*

A few hours later, the conference ends with Emma and Jean talking about plans for backup, for weapons, for getaway vehicles. Erik watches as Kiriya checks her pocket watch, and then she smiles and conducts them out the door. “We have three days to get ready,” the _geiko_ says, and she catches up each of the others’ hands in turn to say goodbye.

He’s still thinking about calling in a favor from Langley – there is a cache of weapons and other items that they’ve assembled for him at the embassy in the Philippines, an innocuous package full of useful things – when Kiriya returns, and this time, she’s followed in by another young woman in a sober black suit, who is carrying a laden tray.

The girl sets the tray down on the table and then bows herself out of the room.

He holds his breath, and the door clicks locked behind her.

Kiriya exhales softly, back on the cushion on his right, and offers him a tentative smile. “Do you drink, Max-san?”

“You’re not asking about coffee or tea,” he says. “I know what a teapot looks like, anywhere in the world, and there’s no teapot on that tray.”

She shakes her head.

“Then the answer is _not very often_ ,” he says. “Often I drink only because I have to look the part.” He thinks of long hours waiting for information, of listening in on hushed conversations in dimly lit bars, of walking discreetly behind someone who was drunk or lost or both, waiting for them to stumble so he could “assist” them.

She tilts her head at him, both curious and mildly interested; but instead she says, “Will you drink with me?”

Erik raises his eyebrows. “I’ve tried to read a little about what it is you do – you entertain people, you said. And I’ve noticed that everyone here drinks, if they need to get into some kind of relaxed or informal conversation....”

That gets him a quiet laugh. “I am right, once again, and it is still impossible to slip anything past you. That is just how this culture works; people must have some means of keeping their public and private faces in neatly separated compartments. The alcohol is an excuse to slip from one face to another and still maintain dignity, for whatever definition of dignity exists at the party.”

“Which is...you, right? You are the masks of dignity at the party.”

“When we’re not the ones encouraging the guests to let slip their masks in the first place,” Kiriya says, blushing just a little. “I am expected to be more convivial, to be more – for lack of a better word – sparkling, when I join a party and everyone is well into their cups. And most days I can do that without even having to put on a show. But sometimes I would just like to drink quietly.”

“By yourself,” he guesses.

She shrugs. “By myself, or with a few companions.”

He stomps down hard on the irrational surge of warmth that he feels in his chest, because she’s surely not implying.... “Then why ask me to drink with you?”

She blushes again, but she says, “Why shouldn’t I? Am I not about to put myself in danger, and are you not about to be the person who will watch my back and protect me?”

“I still don’t know why you’re volunteering to do this,” Erik mutters, and he can _feel_ the traitorous thud of his heart against his ribs. “I don’t doubt you’d be beyond helpful in my kinds of operations, but these are dangerous things because there can be witnesses, there can be survivors, and doesn’t that become some kind of liability for you? You, a public figure? I saw your face the other day, in a national magazine. You were promoting something...I’m guessing it was a kind of beauty product?”

“Yes. A brand of cold cream. I use it myself, actually.”

“So. A face like yours, known all over the country. And you’re doing _this_? You will be, as you say, the point of the spear? _Why?_ ”

“Because there is no one else. Because I must,” Kiriya says, simply. “And because some small part of this is personal for me; I believe you were paying attention earlier, when Emma-san said that I had asked her for a favor.”

And what else can he say, after that? He nods, helpless for once. “Will you pour or shall I?”

“May I show you how it’s done, here?” she says, and lays out the items on the tray: a shallow dish on a short conical stem, and a matching flask in a vessel of steaming-hot water. Pale green ceramic, decorative cracks spiderwebbing the glaze, frail and elegant in her hands. “This is called _sake_ ,” she says. “An alcoholic beverage brewed from rice.”

He watches her wrap her sleeves around her fingers, watches her pull out the stopper from the flask and then, very carefully, lift it out of its bath. A graceful movement to pour into the dish, which she pushes toward him with her fingertips after replacing the flask in its hot bath. “Max-san,” she says.

“What do you wish to drink to?” he asks.

“I have no idea,” she says. “But perhaps to good fortune, because Emma-san said that we’re going to need all the luck we can get on a mission as dangerous and as important as the one we’ve gotten ourselves into.”

Erik nods, solemnly. “To victory, then.”

The _sake_ goes down easily, and there is a faint sweetness on his tongue, like apples and a distant memory of summer flowers.

“And now you pour for your companion,” Kiriya says. “A fine tradition, I think. One that other cultures would do well to adopt. To exchange the cup is to break the ice. You must make sure that your companion drinks with you; there is no question of keeping up, because you exchange roles at each round. One drinks, one pours, and the conversation flows, on and on, back and forth.”

He uses his handkerchief to handle the flask – the heat is welcome on his fingertips – and he manages to fill the dish without spilling a drop. He’s not sure he’s imagining the gentleness in her eyes as she picks up the dish with both hands, as she drains it in three sips.

“Oh, I needed that,” she murmurs, and she smiles and looks away. “You must think me some kind of lush.”

“I just think that your job must often be better than mine,” he says, sincerely.

“Of course my job is better,” she laughs. “I am in good company, night after night, and often I get to do something that I both enjoy and am rather talented at, and sometimes I even come home drunk and people laugh with me and not at me.”

“Except when you have to deal with boors and idiots.”

“Except then, but thankfully there are often more good guests than bad,” and she pushes the empty dish back to him. “Another?”

“Please,” he says. And: “If we get out of this, I would like to see you at one of these gatherings.”

“If we get out of this, Max-san, I will invite you and Emma-san and Jean-san to a little party of our own.”

Erik nods, and drinks his second round, and this time when he pours for her he’s smiling.

*

Three days later, Erik is still awake when someone knocks late at night on the door to the house in Takarazuka. He’s on his feet and creeping out of his room before he can think about it, knife out and ready to strike at any moment.

He crosses the house on silent feet, and peers carefully around the last corner that leads into the foyer – but then someone turns the lights on, and he can hear someone speaking, and he knows who’s here.

“Max-san,” Kiriya says, when she sees him. She looks distinctly ruffled, as though she’s been walking in a high breeze, or as though she’s been running. Her hair is tangled and falling down around her shoulders in loose curls.

He’s never seen her in red before: dark red shading to black at her hems, striped in various widths of gray. A silver-and-gold belt around her waist, tied with a blue cord.

Touya looks up from where he’s kneeling next to her feet, and he says something to her in a gruff tone, and she sighs and pats his shoulder and shakes her head.

“Is anything wrong,” Erik asks, and he puts his knife away.

“As I was just telling Touya-san, I’m all right,” she says, a little testily. “There was a slight problem with one of my shoes earlier, while I was walking from one engagement to another. I didn’t fall, however, and my ankle no longer hurts, so there should be no problems when we go to Kobe later.”

“Ice,” he instructs, laconically.

Touya grunts, and nods, and then he beckons Erik over.

“What?”

Kiriya sighs. “I’m _fine_ , honestly, but if it makes the two of you feel better – all right, Touya-san, go and get some ice, and I’ll sit down. Yes?” She says something else after that, something a little sharp, and then Touya is shrugging and getting to his feet.

Erik takes Touya’s position at her side, and she places her hand in his and he walks her into the small room next to the door. He watches her shift, and doesn’t miss it when she covers up a wince with her sleeve, but he says nothing and merely sits down on her left side.

Touya follows them in with a bowl of ice cubes wrapped in a tea towel – which he hands to Erik. “Look after her,” the man says, gruffly, and then he leaves, making sure to lock the door behind him.

In the quiet of the night he can clearly hear the purr of the car’s engine as Touya drives away.

“I have no idea what just happened,” Kiriya says, suddenly.

Erik blinks, and shakes his head, and then he grabs the bowl, and he can feel the sudden warmth in his face when he says, “Your foot, please.”

She makes a face, but she shifts again and pulls off one of her white socks, and places that bared foot in his lap. “I’m sorry to cause you such trouble,” she says.

“No trouble at all.” He shakes his head again – he’s never seen such a small foot before, but then again, Kiriya barely comes up to Touya’s shoulder, and Erik has a few inches on him. He supposes that the proportions must work out in her favor, eventually, especially if she dances.

“I’ll make sure to be careful,” she offers.

“Please do,” he says. “If not for the sake of this mission, then for your confederates’ sake.”

He starts when she suddenly leans in toward him. Her fingers are warm on his shoulder. “And for yours, too,” Kiriya says. “I can’t fail you, after all, not here and not now.”

///

_Five: Names_

Charles doesn’t flinch the first time he’s backhanded across the face; he just keeps staring straight ahead, at the woman in the blue-and-white yukata.

“Maybe I can believe the rumors after all,” the woman drawls, after a while. “Maybe you do know something about fortitude, if you’re sitting there silently, if you know how to take blows like that. Maybe you might know something about stoicism.” She inclines her head to the other woman, the one in the suit, the one standing in front of Charles. “Again.”

He can feel his teeth cut into his cheek, this time, and after his ears have stopped ringing he turns his head to the side and spits the blood out because he can’t stand the awful rusted-metal taste of it.

And he still doesn’t make a sound.

Jean and Emma’s plan had been relatively simple: get Kiriya in to the hot springs resort to entertain Yashida Mariko and her men. They’ve planted listening devices in several of the tearooms – there’s one in the vase beneath the wall scroll in its recessed alcove, and there’s another one in Charles’s obi, disguised as a butterfly-shaped brooch – and all he needs to do now is to get any of these other people to talk.

But Charles had barely set foot in the door before he was roughly seized, and he’d only had time to cry out, once, before he was bound at wrists and ankles and then forced to sit down at the table opposite his target.

They’ve at least bound his hands in front of him, but the rough rope is already chafing his skin.

He can feel tears leaking down his cheeks, but he doesn’t sob, doesn’t cry out, though his ankle and his hands are throbbing, icy pain spiking down his nerves.

“I know who you are,” Yashida says after a long moment. “And you and I both know I’m not just talking about your professional name, though I’m given to understand you at least come by your dance credentials honestly. A master dancer, yes? What an unusual accomplishment. About to attain the rank of _natori_ if my sources are to be believed. I do salute you. That’s a rare gift in women – and an even rarer one in men.”

He stays silent.

“Still not talking? My opinion of you rises with each passing second. Pity your life’s growing shorter at the same time. I wonder what it is you’ve come after me for. I’ve been accused of so many strange things that sometimes I almost believe I’m guilty of all of them.”

He closes his eyes.

“Ah, a sign of weakness at last. So you are alive in there? So I’m not just talking to an automaton? Go on, then, Kiriya of Osaka. Ask me questions.”

It’s a line he himself has used to great effect on his clients, and it’s an irony that he now finds himself on the receiving end. But Charles allows himself to chuckle, and he doesn’t stop even when Yukio winds her hard fingers into his hair and yanks him back. His throat hurts at the sudden stretch and strain, and even after he’s released he labors for his breath and the words he needs to say, the words that are part of his script. “I didn’t know you were working with _gaijin_ now.”

And – there. Yashida’s eyebrow twitches. “Am I? Now how did you come to hear about that, I wonder.”

Charles just keeps staring at her.

“I may have been dealing with some strange old people in recent weeks, yes,” Yashida says, carelessly. “What strange people those _gaijin_ are. Garrulous old folk. They went on and on about such useless memories. What do I care about some kind of space to live, some kind of pure state? Those words mean nothing to me; I know just enough to know no such thing is possible in this existence. I do what they want me to do as long as it suits me. Do they need money? I can provide them with that. Women – or boys? I need only snap my fingers to provide. These are trifles compared to what I want from them. And I am doing nothing more than what my teachers would have done, and I have had such good teachers.”

“And these teachers of yours – they’re all dead,” Charles murmurs, hoarsely. “Including the ones connected to Marko Technologies.”

“Especially them; they knew such useful things and they had such wonderful technology, but they were even more corrupted than the old ones. Perhaps you know something of them? In any case I regretted the necessity of their deaths – but a woman must keep her secrets. I would think you already knew something of that, whatever it is you actually are under those robes.”

Charles blinks in shock – and he immediately hates himself for it.

“Have I touched a nerve? Are you worried now?” Yashida murmurs, mockingly solicitous. “Don’t worry, _I’m_ not interested in finding anything out, and neither is Yukio – are you, though?”

Charles glances at the other woman.

It would be easier to read a blank stone wall.

Yashida laughs quietly. “Well, I suppose you will just have to find out for yourself, won’t you?”

There’s a scuffle, suddenly, in the corridor immediately outside – and everyone else in the room draws their weapons. Yukio reaches for her sword in its scabbard, strapped to her back, and Yashida’s right hand has disappeared into her left sleeve.

The rasp of the sliding door is too loud; it grates on Charles’s already-raw nerves. He can’t stop himself from making a dismayed sound when two more enforcers march in, and trapped firmly between them is Max, hands bound behind his back and blood trickling from his nose.

“So you are also a practitioner of the fine art of hypocrisy, Kiriya of Osaka,” Yashida sneers, and the room stands down. “No wonder you knew to ask about _gaijin_. I wonder,” and she moves her hand in a quick chopping gesture.

The men holding Max drop him more or less in Charles’s lap; Max winces when he falls heavily onto his knees, and Charles winces, both because Max’s weight sends a fresh shot of pain down his own strained nerves, and because the fall leaves Max groaning, long and low in his throat.

“A pretty picture you two make,” Yashida sneers. “Enjoy it while it lasts. I don’t care how much or how little you know, and I don’t care to answer any more questions. Tomorrow the newspapers will be all agog to find out about you and your lover and a tryst gone horribly wrong, Kiriya of Osaka, and no one will even remember that I was here in all the fuss. What a scandal that will be, don’t you think? How convenient for me, and how inconvenient for you.”

Max stirs, and in so doing he rolls off Charles’s lap.

But now he’s face up on the mats and – he’s laughing.

“Max-san,” Charles murmurs, and he wishes he could reach out to him, because this isn’t in the plan – at least, the laughter isn’t.

Max doesn’t even seem to see him. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Yashida Mariko,” he growls.

“And I you,” is the mocking reply. “Now who are you? Tell me, quickly, and then the two of you can die.”

“Max Eisenhardt, Interpol,” Max lies, smoothly.

Charles smiles, and ducks his head.

That’s the first signal.

Something goes _thwip!_ in the room, and someone breathes in suddenly, the sharp sound of a dying gasp, followed by a thump that sounds very much like a body hitting the mats.

There’s another _thwip!_ , and another.

The three men surrounding Yashida are all dead, slumped over, brains and blood staining the floor and its straw mats.

“Yukio,” Yashida shouts, furious and surprised.

“Oh no you don’t,” Charles cries, and, still keeping his head down, he _twists_ on the cushion. Bound hands and all, he reaches out to snag Yukio’s ankles – and he connects and claws into the skin and he pulls, hard, and she comes crashing down too.

“Max-san!” Charles hisses, and squirms to pin the woman’s legs.

Max gets slowly to his feet, and with a negligent shrug he’s out of his ropes and he walks over to Yukio’s prone form, and he draws her sword.

Charles holds out his wrists, fearlessly – and he smiles in thanks when Max cuts him free. A clumsy stroke, to be sure, and he doesn’t want to think about what might have happened if the man had _missed_ – but it’s more than enough to be going on with. He focuses instead on rubbing the red welts away from wrists, on flexing his fingers to restart the circulation in his hands; he winces a little for the pins and needles but masters the pain with a quick breath.

And when he looks up Max deliberately turns the sword around and presents it to him, hilt first.

“Thank you,” Charles says, as warmly as he can – and then he’s pulling at Yukio’s hair, returning the gesture from earlier.

It’s easy to put the bare blade to her throat.

“So tell me, how much do you value this one’s life,” Max growls at Yashida, as he draws a small revolver from _somewhere_ on his person and points it right between her eyes. “And tell the rest of your men to stand down,” he says, sweeping a look around the room, to the two remaining enforcers – the ones who had marched him in, now isolated from their leader. “Or Kiriya-san and I will both strike. And we might fall, but we’ll take you and yours with us.”

Charles raises his head just in time to see the white-hot fury in their enemy’s eyes.

“What do you want,” Yashida hisses after a very long moment of charged silence.

Max actually smiles at that, and Charles can’t help but do the same. “The one thing I came here for. Information. You connect the dots for me and for her. And maybe afterwards we’ll let you go.”

“Such a generous offer,” Yashida sneers. “And even if you were a credible threat, which neither of you are – what makes you think you can sift the truth from the lies? What makes you think you can still get what you want?”

“I’ve got a lot of good people on my side,” Max says.

Yashida scoffs, but Charles can read the shifts in her face and he murmurs, “Max-san, have a care. Be on your guard.”

 _“Quod erat demonstradum,”_ Max says, and he shifts into a more stable shooting position, holding the revolver in both hands, feet braced shoulder-width apart. “Your choice, Yashida. You talk, or we end this here and now.”

Charles holds his breath at the mulish expression on the woman’s face.

There’s a loud crash in the corridor – and the whole scene falls to pieces, and Charles watches it all in a kind of horrified daze where everything moves in slow motion, even as the adrenaline rushes through him and he slashes through the ropes binding his ankles before returning the sword to Yukio’s throat.

“Max-san,” he hisses, even as he fights to get to his feet, even as he tries to wind his free arm around Yukio’s chest to hold her between him and the flying bullets.

Yukio fights him every step of the way – but he nicks her with his sword and she growls and subsides and reluctantly moves with him.

“Max-san!” Charles tries again, and this time he risks reaching out, and he catches the man’s sleeve – and he doesn’t know where he gets the strength to pull Max to his side. Yukio cannot possibly serve them both as a shield but she _can_ be used as a hostage.

Yashida must have abruptly come to the same conclusion because suddenly she screams “Hold your fire!” The smoke clears slowly. One of her remaining men is on his knees, bleeding profusely from a bullet in the gut. Yashida’s entire left sleeve is soaked in blood, and angry is too pale and weak a word to describe the look on her face.

“Still got her, good,” Max murmurs, and Charles glances at him – and almost immediately wishes he hadn’t done so.

Max is bleeding, too; he’s carrying the revolver awkwardly in his left hand, and there is blood on the fingers of his right hand where he’s holding it to his left shoulder.

“Do you need help,” Charles says, urgently.

Before Max can answer there’s another noise in the corridor – and this time someone thrusts the doors open, and Charles is of half a mind to grab the revolver and Max and just _run_ , the mission be damned – but the voice that shouts this time is entirely familiar, as are the twin bright shocks of hair, one like gold and one like flame. “Everybody freeze!”

Yukio growls again, but this time, she sounds defeated – or at the very least she goes limp in Charles’s grasp. He watches her carefully, anyway, even as he inches in Max’s direction.

Emma is smiling, sardonic and victorious all at once, as she roughly forces Yashida to her knees, as she ties her up in an intricate series of knots.

Jean, who is still carrying a sniper rifle, checks the bodies and confiscates the weapons. At the end of it she comes around to Charles and Max at the other end of the room and drops an assortment of emptied pistols on the table with a clatter. She plucks the sword from Charles’s hands easily. “Up,” she snaps at Yukio, before handing Charles a small first-aid kit.

“Thank you,” Charles murmurs, and he reaches out for Max’s shoulders and pushes him gently down. “It’s all right, it’s all right, I’ve got you,” he says, and Max huffs out a quiet laugh. “What is it?”

“None of that was in the plan,” Max says, and he catches his breath in a pained gasp as he half-falls to his knees. “Except the part where I saw you sitting there at the table, quiet and dignified.”

“Just because I looked the part doesn’t mean I was entirely fearless,” Charles mutters.

“You’re a very good actress, then.”

Charles blinks, and looks away quickly, before he’s overwhelmed. He doesn’t have time to say anything; he busies himself with applying the thin bandage from the kit to Max’s shoulder – and the bandage is almost immediately soaked through as soon as he puts it on him.

“Kiriya-san,” Jean says, suddenly, urgently. “The police are coming, and the two of you must be gone before then.”

“We haven’t managed to get the information from Yashida yet,” Max protests.

“Jean and I will ask the questions – we’re allowed to be here, and you’re not, so _shoo_ ,” Emma says from across the room. “Kiriya-san, we’ll contact you again soon, and we’ll ask all of your questions, and all of Max’s too. That’s a promise.”

“You had better get in touch as soon as you can – you won’t want me to send Touya-san after you,” Charles says. And then he turns back to Max. Without hesitation he reaches into his kimono and tears off the sleeve of his under-robe; he uses the pale blue silk to keep the first bandage in place.

“You shouldn’t,” Max starts – but he interrupts himself with a wince and a hiss. The skin around his mouth is white with pain as he grits his teeth.

Charles murmurs, “Quiet,” and he gets his feet under him and he boosts the man to a standing position.

Jean opens one of the sliding doors for them, and thankfully there’s no one to interrupt their slow, meandering progress through the corridors.

Max doesn’t speak until after they’ve left Kobe behind. He’s lying across the backseat of Emma’s car, a compact little sedan that seems to hide a very large engine beneath its trim little bonnet. “Kiriya-san. I was listening to the whole conversation, before they brought me in.”

Charles doesn’t exactly swerve them off the road in his surprise, but it’s a close-run thing, and he’s white-knuckled around the steering wheel. He thinks vaguely of Yachiru’s warnings, of her advice, and the regret wells up in him. Secrets are such strange things, and he’s grown so used to working with people who’ve accepted both his public face and his private one.

This is the part where he’s going to get his heart broken, he thinks.

This is the part where it’s going to _hurt_.

“Yes?” he asks, as gently as he still can, still putting the lilt into it, and he glances into the rear-view mirror and tries to smile.

“I heard everything,” Max says, slowly, hoarsely, “including what Yashida was implying – what she was saying about _you_.”

Charles draws in a deep breath, and steels himself: “I might not have been entirely forthright with you....”

“Kiriya-san,” Max says, again, and Charles shuts up in sheer self-defense.

“Max-san,” he says, instead, faintly.

“You must know – ” Max says around a groan, “you must know none of it matters to me?”

“What doesn’t matter?”

“I don’t care who or what you happen to actually be under your robes. That’s for you to tell me, if you should even choose to tell at all. It’s your truth, your secret to reveal, and I will wait for you to share it with me, or I will wait for you to choose to hold that truth close. I only ask that you let me know what you’ve decided.”

Charles laughs in relief, a little bit hysterically and a little bit recklessly. “Why, Max-san, I hadn’t even known that you’d noticed.”

“I’ve spent too much time noticing already,” Max mutters. “I can’t help but think of you, and the way you wear your robes, the way you move, the way you dress. But you’re _not_ a distraction. Never that. You’ve had quite the opposite effect on me, and I have dreaded every moment of this mission, knowing that soon it will mean having to leave you, knowing that I may never come this way again.”

Charles has never heard Max say so many words before; he wants to respond – he wants to acknowledge the man’s bravery, his nerves, but Max is still talking.

“And I myself have not told you the entire truth, either.”

Charles finally finds his voice. “ _Max-san._ Stop right there – you are to tell me nothing that will compromise you. You are still on your mission, and I on mine. If you wish to pursue this conversation – can it _wait_ until you’re no longer bleeding? Until we’re both at liberty to talk about it?”

“I will stop,” Max mutters, sounding only vaguely chastised, “if you will tell me that you do wish to have this conversation, in its entirety, just the two of us.”

“There are no words to describe how much I’d like to have this conversation,” Charles growls, and he’s even being entirely truthful.

And then he’s pulling into the driveway of the house called Iwakura, and he’s almost leaping out of the car to bang on the gate, four times. “Touya-san!”

His _otokoshi_ more or less falls out the front door, white with shock. “I wasn’t expecting you back for another day – are you all right, Kiriya-san?”

“I’m fine, damn it, stop fluttering. It’s Max-san who needs help, and he needs it quickly. Call your sister and tell her to come to us at the Takarazuka house, as fast as she can. I will settle all her expenses. The important thing is that she has to come here to tend to him.”

“You can’t take him to a hospital?”

“I cannot risk it. Now will you help me or not?”

“I’ll help you,” Touya says, and he goes to the car, peers into the back. “Where hurt,” he asks Max.

Charles can just barely hear the reply: “One bullet, left shoulder.”

“Getting help. For you.” And Touya _runs_.

The adrenaline rush is wearing off. Somehow Charles manages to get back in the car, but not before he runs into the house – past three _otokoshi_ -in-training, who trip all over themselves bowing to him, and past Touya’s eldest brother, to whom he has to bow before he can ask for the location of the medicine cabinet. He rummages in it for painkillers – and then on the way out one of the boys hands him a cup of water.

“Kiriya-san,” Max says, weakly.

He thrusts two white tablets and the water at him. “Take those, and then we can go.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet.”

*

He’s sitting at his makeup table, staring blankly at the rope burns around his wrists. The house is silent, its usual occupants gone. There are only four of them here: Charles himself, Touya and his sister, and – Max.

Whoever Max really is.

He’s still thinking about what the man virtually admitted was hiding from him.

Someone is calling his name: “Kiriya-san.”

He blinks himself back to the present and – yes, he knows who this person is. Touya’s sister, Megumi. Her hands are bloody and her hair is a mess and she looks tired, but she might be smiling, and that wakes Charles up all the way. “How is he?”

“He will regain the full use of his arm,” she says. “It was a close-run thing, however. If you hadn’t acted quickly and decisively, I would have had to consider amputation. There was a lot of damage, and the bullet inconveniently splintered into several parts when it hit the bone – but, as I said. He will be fine.”

Charles takes a deep breath, and very determinedly does not slump over in his profound relief. He takes both of her hands in a firm grip. “Thank you so much for your hard work.”

She smiles thinly. “You might not want to thank me when I send you my bill.”

“I’ll pay any price you ask,” he says. And then: “When can I see him?”

“Now is all right; he’s only lightly sedated, at his request. But – a word of advice?”

“Yes?”

“You look a fright,” Megumi says, and then she gets to her feet and leaves.

Charles almost laughs and almost cries – but he looks at himself in his mirror and he fixes his hair, wipes away the sweat and the blood and the tears, and he changes into a more casual outfit – white kimono striped with maroon, and a simple black obi – though he does so with great difficulty. He’s tired to the bone, now, and he’s still worried about Jean and Emma because they haven’t checked in yet, and then there’s Max to worry about.

There are faint dark shadows beneath his eyes, but there’s nothing to be done for them, and he takes a deep breath before he crosses the corridor into the other room.

Max is so still on the white quilt, but he’s been cleaned up. The smell of blood is just a distant memory in the air.

The lines of pain seem almost etched into the man’s face, deep around his eyes and in his forehead. His torso and left arm are completely swathed in bandages.

Charles takes a handkerchief from his sleeve and dabs away the sweat on Max’s temples.

“Thank you,” Max whispers.

“You’re welcome,” Charles murmurs. And then, louder: “What were you _thinking_ , getting yourself shot?”

“I could not exactly control our enemies’ actions; that’s part of why they were our enemies in the first place,” is the dry rejoinder.

“You could have _died_.” And Charles is horrified with himself when the sentence ends on a quiet sob.

Max reaches out to him, and rough fingertips make contact with his red wrist. “Don’t cry for me, please.” And: “I’ve been wanting to do that since I came here. Since I met you at the train station, and you touched me, like this.”

“You were badly disorientated and you looked at me like I was some kind of hallucination,” Charles tells him. “I had to let you know that you were still in the waking world.”

“I don’t normally like being touched,” Max says.

Charles starts. “You should have said. I kept touching you – I couldn’t stop – ”

“I didn’t want you to. I – I like it when you touch me.”

Charles pulls away at that, but only so he can cover his face with his hands. “Oh, what a fine pair we make, Max-san.”

“Yes, Kiriya-san.” And then: “Do I need to repeat anything I said in the car?”

“I remember all of it,” Charles says. “Why doesn’t it matter to you – how can it _not_?”

“I don’t know,” Max says.

Charles blinks at him – but he still looks just as wrecked and just as _real_.

Max goes on: “I just – it’s just that it’s _you_ , Kiriya-san. How can little things like whether you’re a man or a woman matter to me, when I already have first-hand experience of everything else about you? Of the most important things? You’re kind, you’re funny, you’re intelligent, you’re reckless, and you’re beautiful. You’ve tried so hard to understand me when it wasn’t even part of your job. You’ve been such a patient teacher. Anyone who can’t see how good you are, who lets little things like that get in the way of really seeing you: they’re lower than dirt.”

He’s breathing hard, after; Charles murmurs soothing nonsense at him and offers him a drink of water from the pitcher and cup on the dresser. Max groans softly while lifting himself up onto one elbow, and when he’s lying back again Charles smoothes the lines away from his forehead.

“Thank you for telling me the truth,” Charles says quietly, after a long moment of Max trying to catch his breath. “I...I don’t know what to say. The only people who’ve said those things to me are people whom I already hold in high regard. Touya-san. My Older Sister – my mentor, and also my legal family; her name is Yachiru. Emma, once, and Jean, when she was most of the way to drunk. And now you.”

“I’m in good company, then,” Max says, and he tries to laugh.

“But how can you know all these things about me when we’ve only known each other a few weeks, if at that?”

“I observe. It’s part of my job,” Max says.

“There is one more thing that those people have in common,” Charles sighs. He steels himself at last. “They all know my name – my real name, the name I was born with. Not _Kiriya_. That is my art-name, the name that I am known by as a _geiko_.”

Max shifts and looks him right in the eyes. “As I said. You tell me only if you want to. The last thing I want is to force you – ”

“My name is Charles Xavier.” The words come out in a rush, and afterwards, he knows he’s got his hands over his mouth, and he makes a mighty effort to keep looking at Max. He wants to close his eyes; he wants to look away.

Max smiles, and holds out his good hand. “Pleased to meet you, Charles Xavier. I’m Erik Lehnsherr.”

Charles slowly lowers one of his hands, and speaks past the fingers of the other. “How can I believe that all of this is true; that you’re just accepting this, so easily?”

“Easily? Not at all,” Max – no, _Erik_ , he has to call him by his real name now – says. “I have a thousand questions for you, _Charles_. I want to know your story. I would like to see you dance.”

At last, Charles reaches out and clasps Erik’s hand in both of his, silent, overwhelmed.

///

_Six: Cherry Blossoms_

Osaka in the spring is a far cry from Osaka in the winter, and Erik blinks and stops on the sidewalk and a group of little boys and girls runs around him, laughing and smiling and singing at the tops of their voices. They are all dressed identically – yellow hard caps and white smocks with blue writing – and one of them stumbles and falls almost onto her face, and when she starts to cry, loudly, he’s halfway to helping her up before he can think.

She babbles at him, and clings to his wrist with both her chubby hands, and he smiles and shrugs and he doesn’t know what to say or do, and she shakes her head when he tries to wipe away her tears.

In the end one of the minders comes over to collect the little girl, and she says a broken “Thank you” and bows to him, and the entire group is moving away before he has a chance to respond.

There is always going to be too much to learn about this place, and that’s as good an excuse as any to stay on.

He remembers Touya driving him to the airport so he could return to Langley and turn in his reports, wincing as every movement jarred his injured arm. He remembers getting on the plane and half-falling into his seat – and he remembers receiving a comprehensive dossier on the Shingen family and their connections to entities as diverse as Marko Technologies and the ODESSA networks just as they took off.

Special delivery, even, because Emma Frost had handed him the report. He remembers her smirk as she settled into the seat next to his – but that smirk had smoothed out into a genuine smile once they were midway over the Pacific Ocean. “I’ve got something else for you.”

He remembers smiling, tightly; he remembers his heart leaping up into his throat as she reached into her purse and then held out a thick cream-colored envelope with both hands. He remembers accepting it with his good hand and squinting at the cross-like symbol inked into the sealed flap, before he tore in, awkwardly. He remembers a piece of blue-and-gold-flecked paper falling into his lap.

He still has that letter with him, tucked into the inner pocket of his leather jacket, next to his knife. Two of the most important objects in his life. He has all but memorized the handwriting and the words that had been written to him.

Japan in the spring is still a little chilly, last of the winter winds blowing at the trees and at the grass, and he swears he can see the ripple across the great expanse of the park before him, all the way down to the soaring castle at the heart of it, surrounded by protective moats.

This view is surrounded by blushing pink everywhere he looks: cherry trees nodding in the breeze, scattering flowers everywhere. The children had run off toward a particularly elegant specimen, a vast spread of branches and picnickers jostling for space on the grass beneath.

The letter contains instructions for him. He sets off down one of the paths, and he dodges all manner of promenaders and people out enjoying the day; he ignores the surprised stares and whispers following him, and loses himself in his thoughts.

From Osaka to Langley to Buenos Aires – the previous winter is no more than a blur of memories to him. Two long months of recovery, then getting back to work, following the final strands of an old, strange web. Guns out, badges in place, arrests and car chases and at least one other injury. He’d limped for a week after spraining his ankle during a hair-raising chase through narrow side-streets in some little village three days out of Buenos Aires – but he’d got his man, and the man’s woman, so he’d counted it as a victory, albeit one that had resulted with him needing crutches.

And all throughout, he remembers a strange but fervent wish: he remembers thinking that the missions would have been so much easier if he’d had someone to watch his back on a more permanent basis. Someone he could trust with his life – someone with blue eyes and a curiously delicate way of holding a sword. A _partner_ , a steadying presence, someone who could smooth his path for him, like oil in an engine.

Someone who he’d go out on a limb for, every time, without hesitation. Someone he’d risk his own life for.

He’s still recovering from the greater shock that came after that, however: coming into the office for what he thought was a routine debriefing, he’d opened the door to find Jean sipping tea and exchanging small talk with both Moira MacTaggert and her boss, Oliver Levine. A new project: enhanced cooperation between the United States and the United Kingdom, investigating Asian crime families that were operating out of Japan and Hong Kong.

Right now, he’s thinking about exploring Osaka on foot, ward by ward, street corner by street corner, bridge by bridge, and he doesn’t notice that he’s crossing another bridge in the direction of another magnificent cherry tree until the wind blows back in his direction and he’s suddenly standing in a storm of pink petals. People are calling out in admiration, and he can’t stop himself from smiling in surprised pleasure.

And then there’s a voice calling his name: “Erik!”

He thinks, briefly, of the words in the letter:

_The next time we meet, I hope that you will permit me to call you by your name, just your name, without any honorifics._

_And I would like it if you would extend me the same courtesy._

So he turns around carefully once he gets to the foot of the bridge, trying to locate the voice, and someone coughs and taps his shoulder.

Erik holds his breath as he turns around.

Charles is smiling at him, and he’s blushing right to the roots of his copper-and-brown hair, brightly enough to nearly obscure the freckles dotted over his nose and cheeks. He’s wearing what is easily the most amazing kimono Erik has ever seen in his life. White collar a stark contrast against the black upper portion; obi in several shades of blue, secured with a braided black cord; and then the skirts dyed in rich red and orange and gold, the pattern and colors reminiscent of autumn and sunsets.

Charles is holding up one corner of those skirts in his left hand.

Erik finally finds his voice: “Hello, Charles.”

“Hello, Erik.” Impossible for that smile to grow any brighter, any more beautiful – but somehow Charles manages it, and Erik watches him bow, and attempts to return the gesture. However, it’s much easier to take Charles’s right hand, and to trail after him. He can ask his questions later; he can say hello to Touya and meet Charles’s Older Sister later.

Right now, all the world is in Charles’s smile, in the cherry blossoms falling into his hair.

[](http://fav.me/d56ze1v)

  


_tsuzuku_  



	2. Chapter 2

title: Flower and Willow and Steel - Coda: When Things Begin  
author: / [](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**ninemoons42**](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/)  
rating: NC-17  
X-Men Verse: XMFC  
pairing: Charles/Erik  
notes: A follow-up to Flower and Willow and Steel, this basically contains the sex scene that I couldn't put into the main fic. Dedicated to Sarlyne, my wonderful artist!

**_Flower and Willow and Steel - Coda: When Things Begin_ **

Erik gets out of the car, at the gate that both Charles and Touya have explained to him is called a _torii_ , and for a long moment he can only stare at the little house with the seashell-shaped entrance.

The streets are full of painted and bewigged _geiko_ hurrying everywhere, many of them accompanied by maids or by members of their junior ranks, whom Charles calls _maiko_ – and a handful of them are standing outside the gate that marks Charles’s house. They are a feast of colors and patterns in the falling darkness of the early winter afternoon.

It is December 13, and he’s been invited to come to the house, but he has no idea what to expect, or indeed why he’s been called in the first place. He’s dressed a little more formally, and that is all; it is cold enough that he is hardly the other person walking the streets in a turtleneck and a long coat buttoned up to the chin.

Luckily, he’s out of place among the women in their finery for just a moment; he’s saved when a girl in two layers of checked kimono excuses herself past the small crowd milling on the sidewalk, and calls out his name. “Erik-san?”

“I am he,” Erik says, and he is conscious of the eyes watching him as he approaches the gate.

She smiles. “Kiriya-san says please come in.”

He steps past the _geiko_ , keeping a politely neutral expression on his face, and he follows the girl into the vestibule – but then they both have to squeeze aside because an elderly woman in green brocade, her hair gone almost completely silver, is bowing deeply, facing the interior of the house.

And Charles is returning the gesture, on his knees in the foyer, and he is wearing such a brilliant smile that Erik is taken aback. He can’t help but smile, either, and once the door closes on the older woman he is standing in her place, bowing as best as he can to Charles.

“Erik,” Charles says, sweetly, and he rises, and offers Erik his hand. “I’m glad you came.”

“I had to come, with an invitation like this,” Erik says, and he extracts a piece of rainbow-hued paper from his pocket. He’d woken up to it decorating his nightstand that morning, folded into a lily with prettily curved petals. 

The handwritten message reads: _Today is a day when many things begin. I would like to see you, if this will be possible for you. There are things that we must speak of._

“I’m glad you liked it,” Charles says, and looks him up and down, appreciatively. “You look rather dashing today. Welcome to my house.” He turns to the girl still standing at Erik’s side. “Kaname-san? Please inform the others that they may give their greetings to Yachiru-san, and please be so kind as to stay with her and assist her. I will be busy with personal matters for the rest of this day.”

“Certainly, Kiriya-san,” the girl says, and she flashes Erik a warm smile and turns to go back outside, picking up a bag from a low table next to the door.

Once the door closes on her, Erik steps out of his shoes and up into the vestibule. “I remember meeting you on the sidewalk outside, when I first came here to this house, to this city, to this place.”

“This is the place where I live, and I have lived here for a long time, since I was found on the streets by a kind _maiko_ in the last month before she turned her collar.” Charles smiles wistfully as he walks down a corridor. “This is where I became an apprentice. This is where I learned how to dance. This is my home – and now, after today, it was supposed to have been legally mine, with all the duties and responsibilities that come with it.”

Erik frowns. “Supposed to?”

“I’ve given up my place in the line of succession,” Charles says, cheerfully. “Which means that as of today, the position of head of this house belongs to me in a very temporary capacity.”

Erik stops and stares at him.

Charles is wearing a magnificent ivory-and-gray kimono with a pattern of red-crested cranes in flight, and a dark blue obi held in place with a gold cord. But the smile on his face far outstrips the magnificence of his outfit – and he certainly doesn’t seem to be in mourning for anything.

“Oh, Erik. Please don’t worry. Nothing untoward has happened, I assure you,” Charles murmurs, and he touches Erik’s wrist – but Erik catches his hand in turn and holds it very gently. “I am still in charge here for as long as I remain a _geiko_. It has just become a more urgent responsibility for me to train an heiress who will inherit the house from me – and, actually, you have just met that heiress.”

“The girl? Kaname?”

“Yes,” Charles says. “She has outstanding promise as a musician; she may very well be the best of us all here in Osaka when it comes to her particular style. It will be very unusual for the leadership of this house to pass from dancers like Yachiru-san and me to her, in time, but it will not be the first time it has happened. I will be very proud of her, and I will continue to encourage her, long after she joins our ranks.”

“Perhaps it will take an unusual _geiko_ like you to watch over a talent like that.”

Charles stops then, wide-eyed, and kisses Erik right in the corridor.

Erik breathes Charles in, intoxicating scent of musk and lilies and pine needles – and can’t help but pull him closer, catching him up very gently at the shoulders. He’s irrationally glad that it’s cold enough for him to be wearing gloves, since they will protect those beautiful robes from being crushed.

“I don’t know how I’ve come to deserve someone like you,” Charles says, laughing and blushing, when he breaks away for a breath. “You take such pains to know my world and to understand it. How are you even possible?”

Erik doesn’t answer; he just concentrates on staring at the hectic light in Charles’s eyes.

“If you continue to look at me like that I won’t be responsible for my actions,” Charles says, eventually, covering his smile, and most of his face, with his sleeve.

Erik smiles, and pulls Charles’s hand down using a fold of fabric. “I’ll just keep looking at you, then.”

Charles’s eyes darken, suddenly, and Erik watches in fascination as he whirls away, robes fluttering out around his ankles. “Erik?”

“Charles.”

“Come with me?”

He follows Charles to the very end of the corridor, around a corner, and watches as Charles stops at last and opens a set of sliding doors. There are quilts laid out, and a low table with a chessboard. Next to the table is a tea service.

“All of this for a guest, Charles – how lucky they must be,” Erik murmurs, and he’s not surprised his voice has gone raspy.

Charles is facing him from inside the room, and he is standing in the corridor.

“All of this is for you, Erik,” Charles says. “Because I think we can both safely say we’ve been leading up to this for a long time now, and this is as good a day as any, given that it is auspicious for me and mine.”

“I have wanted you from the moment I met you,” Erik murmurs. “And nothing has changed that – that feeling that I’ve been carrying around with me.”

Charles’s blush darkens. “And I have wanted you, too, oh so much. I only hope you will not mind if I say that it’s been a long time. Yachiru-san has teased me about this.”

Erik steps into the room, and makes sure to close the door behind him. There is a latch, which he flips closed. “The rest of the house?” he whispers into Charles’s hair.

“No one else is here; the maids have gone for the day, and why do you think I sent Kaname-san out?” Charles is shaking in his arms, with laughter and with a sweet strange shyness.

There’s no way to respond to that except with a kiss, so Erik catches Charles’s chin gently in one hand, and bends down to him. Their lips brush together, once, twice, warm and chaste, and he puts his other hand in Charles’s hair and tugs, very gently, and that’s when Charles groans and presses against him. 

There are hands on Erik’s shoulders. Charles is clinging to him, is making tiny whimpering noises in the back of his throat, is running his tongue over the line of Erik’s lower lip.

So he opens up, easily, without any fear or second thoughts, and he doesn’t know which one of them groans, but that has to be the best groan Erik has ever heard in his life.

The next thing Erik knows, they’re moving, and there is this inexorable gravitational attraction that’s pulling him and pulling him towards Charles. The hands on his shoulders push him down, and Erik goes willingly, and when he opens his eyes they’re kneeling on the quilts, not an inch of space between them from shoulders to knees, smiling breathlessly at each other.

Charles is a _wreck_ : the edges of his blush have vanished into his white collar and his eyes are little more than a sliver-rim of blue around huge black pupils. Erik spares a moment to wonder whether he looks the same way, because his heart is knocking against his ribs like it’s about to burst out of his body, because that’s the adrenaline rush that’s making him _need_.

Charles is saying something; Erik can’t hear him over the hammering pulse in his ears – but then there are hands pushing his coat off his shoulders and Erik can comply with that, and he struggles to get out of the rest of his clothes.

Erik can feel those blue eyes looking him up and down, and he knows that Charles is looking at a lifetime mapped out in the ghosts and scars of old injuries. Still, he catches his breath when Charles sways forward and presses a kiss to his shoulder, to a relatively newer mark, still livid: the scar from the fight at the _onsen_.

“What about you,” Erik says after a moment. 

Charles smiles. “I thought you’d never ask.”

He lets Charles guide his hands. He knows that Charles needs help getting dressed. He knows that there’s a ritual to the kimono and its accoutrements.

But it only takes the work of a few moments and Charles is pulling off his obi, and he’s sighing in relief.

And not another minute passes before Erik is undoing the sashes holding Charles’s kimono layers closed.

Once they’re both down to their bare skins it’s Charles who tumbles Erik down into the quilts – but it’s Erik who calms him with a touch, with a word: “Slowly.” 

“Yes,” Charles laughs, breathlessly. “We have time, don’t we?”

They’re side by side and looking at each other, and Erik wants nothing more than to drown in Charles’s beautiful strange eyes. 

Erik touches him everywhere he can reach: the small of his back, the hollow between his shoulder blades, the skin stretched over his collarbones. He maps the freckles scattered like tiny dark stars over Charles’s arms and chest, the thin white lines and puckers of his own set of scars – and he can’t help but think that they’re just the same, they want the same thing, and this is the realization that makes him pull Charles down into a blinding kiss, the kind that tears him to pieces and scatters his wits.

Charles reciprocates with shaking hands, and Erik can’t stop himself from whispering his name, from pleading for more, and he shouts with relief when Charles finally reaches for him. Hands around his length, and Charles’s increasingly excited movements, and how he wants to hold back, to make this last. Erik’s breathless even before Charles leans in and takes his mouth; he shivers and he shakes under the assault on his senses that is Charles. Charles who is wrapped around him, touching him everywhere.

When Erik’s climax hits him it comes so suddenly, so strongly – like free-fall and a lightning strike down every last nerve in his body.

Erik turns him around, roughly, as soon as he catches his breath; he holds Charles in place against his chest and he sets a merciless whirlwind rhythm as he strokes Charles off in turn. He fastens his mouth to the curve of Charles’s shoulder, and he sucks a series of bruising kisses into the freckled skin, and he can feel every gasp and hitch and shiver that wracks Charles’s frame. 

The shout that Erik wrings from Charles as he comes is beautiful and sweet and thoroughly shattered.

[](http://tinypic.com?ref=t6fsjd)

He wants to take Charles and be taken by him in turn; he wants to taste and touch; he wants to be tied to him, tangled up in him. There will be time, Erik thinks, and when Charles turns back to him Erik smiles. “An auspicious day, you said?” 

Charles nods, and whispers, “We call it _koto hajime_ , the time when things begin – this is our season of debuts, of great performances and important gatherings.”

“And what do you wish to begin, between the two of us,” Erik asks, teasingly.

“I can hardly say _everything_ ,” Charles says, laughing softly. “As I said earlier, that thread was tied between us when we met at the train station in Takarazuka. So perhaps I should say, I want everything else to begin.”

“I think we can manage that,” Erik says. He passes his fingers over the lines in Charles’s face, smoothing them away – and then he falls again into his kiss, into his arms.

_owari_  



	3. Chapter 3

title: Flower and Willow and Steel - Swaying as Grass on the Sea Breeze  
author: / [](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**ninemoons42**](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/)  
rating: G  
X-Men Verse: XMFC  
pairing: Charles/Erik  
notes: Written as a response to [this](http://geisha-licious.tumblr.com/post/30764487113) photograph of a geiko dressing up for the ceremony in which she turns her collar, which I offered as a prompt to Sarlyne. Charles's kimono is a blue version of [this](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/post/25567453614/geisha-licious-geiko-tsunemomo-lovely-lovely) with the same gold embellishments and his own crests. The white obi is based on [this](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/post/30469575158/geisha-licious-katsuyuki-as-maiko-obi), but tied into a drum knot instead of dangling as in the photograph. The dance is wholly from my own imagination, though the play _Hagoromo_ is real. Originally posted [here](http://ninemoons42-five-sentences.tumblr.com/post/31333351224/geisha-licious-erikae-of-konomi-her-okaasan).

Erik is very, very conscious of the whispers all around him, and he's doing his best to slouch down in his seat because, as Yachiru and Touya have explained to him several times, he's still rather too tall even when he's sitting down together with everyone else, and he really isn’t up for another round of passive-aggressive politeness judo with all the other people in the audience and especially the man or woman in the seat behind his - of course, of course, and this is why Charles had offered him a specific ticket in the first place, so Erik could sit close to the stage and yet not obstruct anyone’s view - but he had been stubborn, had asked to be seated near the front and in the center instead.

On the other hand, Erik has been in-country long enough, not to mention has been exposed to several Japanese dialects, to know that the people whispering around him aren't even remotely close to complaining about him: everyone is abuzz about Kiriya and there are several people here who have come back to the Dances just to see her, again and again - and that is something that makes Erik want to hide his grin and at the same time _crow_ about how amazingly talented Kiriya is - Kiriya who is Charles who is currently the toast of Osaka’s cultural scene.

The lights go down, an appreciative murmur sweeps the theater, and someone begins to play the drums: and even this _maiko_ is familiar to Erik, because this is Charles’s heiress, who still answers to the name “Kaname” but is now more properly addressed as Kirie - and she coaxes a tantalizing rhythm from her hand drum, like heartbeat and waves on a shore all at once - an impression that is only heightened when the massed _shamisen_ begin to play and there is a whispering sound of silk on silk, an impression of pure blue on stage.

Blue, as blue as the sky and as the waves and as the Osaka midnight: and this is the first time Erik has ever seen Charles dress like this, the blue of the kimono a near-exact match to the blue of his eyes, and the lights are coming up on his opening pose, in which he is bent partly backwards; slow deliberate movements, languid swaying and the music that goes on like a deceptively lulling hum underneath the restrained force of the dancer’s movements: Charles is dancing to a story based on the play _Hagoromo_ , and he is playing a heavenly being before the inevitable fall, and he uses every gesture and every expression he knows to bring that story to life, all alone on the stage.

Now Charles is unfolding the white obi he is wearing - not the same item that cinches in his kimono; that one is a muted silver-gray - the white is the robe that the character is going to lose to an intruder, to the one who would be the heavenly being’s captor, and Erik is very nearly sure that Charles is looking him in the eyes when he lets the heavy brocade slide from his hands and follows it, falling slowly and steadily to the floor, to the ecstatic applause of the audience.


	4. Chapter 4

title: "hon no kimochi desu"   
author: [](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**ninemoons42**](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/)  
fandom: X-Men: First Class [movieverse]  
characters: Charles Xavier, Erik Lehnsherr, OMC  
rating: G  
notes: A tale from the world of [Flower and Willow and Steel](http://archiveofourown.org/works/457288). Written for [Nekosmuse](http://archiveofourown.org/users/nekosmuse/pseuds/nekosmuse), who asked for a missing scene or a coda for this 'verse, specifying that the story should have Erik in his signature colors of magenta and black.   
The Japanese phrase "Hon no kimochi desu" is said when giving a present to someone, and means something like "Pleace accept this small token of my regard/affections."

 

When there is a knock on the doors to Charles’s private quarters, it’s only the peculiar stillness Charles cultivates as Kiriya that prevents him from smearing the lipstick he’s currently putting on. As it is, there’s a slight tremor in his hand, the hand holding the fine detail brush.

Charles squints at his mirror, completely confused, and then he takes up his bladed hairpin and gets to his feet, at the same time tensing and relaxing every muscle in his body. Preparing for fight-or-flight.

How terrible it would be if he has to fight here, and so he fervently hopes that this is not what’s about to happen.

Charles pulls the white under-layers for his kimono closer and pulls the sliding door open a fraction, just enough to peer out, and - 

“But you’re early,” he half-sighs and half-scolds, and he pouts at Touya and tucks his hairpin into the cloth folded over his heart. “What a beast you are for giving me a scare like that, you are not allowed to do that ever again, and I wasn’t even expecting you for another fifteen minutes, I look a fright - ”

“Sorry,” Touya says, sounding everything but - and his smile becomes a grin as he offers Charles a large white box, bright against the sober grays of his kimono and haori. “Your package, by the way.”

“Oh, thank you,” Charles says, a little mollified. “I thought I’d have to wait another week for this. How fortunate it was finished early.”

“Not sure about that.”

Charles looks up sharply at that, because there’s no reason for his _otokoshi_ to speak to him in English - and then Touya’s looking very pleased with himself, and is stepping out of the way.

“Good evening,” a very familiar voice says, and Charles is suddenly very thankful for his white makeup, because the _oshiroi_ will prevent Erik from seeing him blanch and blush at the same time.

Erik is wearing a very nice fedora tilted down over one eye, and the clean lines of his black suit are not marred in any way by the fact that he is standing in his socks in the corridor outside Charles’s rooms. 

“O-oh, hello,” Charles says to Erik as he flaps one hand at an openly chuckling Touya. “I’m so sorry you have to see me like this, I’m just - I’m basically half-dressed.”

“Rather it’s I who should be apologizing,” Erik says as he takes his hat off. “I may have asked your dresser if I could watch this. Watch you getting ready, I mean. I can come back later if you’d prefer that I were not here - ”

“No!” And Charles covers his mouth with one white sleeve and laughs, amused and bemused all ar once. “I mean, all right, since you’re here, since you know what’s going on, you might as well have your request granted. Come in, please.”

The room is now a little bit cramped with all three of them in it, and Charles puts his box next to the stand in the corner, on which tonight’s kimono awaits: yellow shading to gold with russet accents on the sleeves, softly patterned in twelve-pointed stars dyed into the silk in black and white. The obi that goes with it is plain stark scarlet figured in stylized maple leaves.

How Charles manages to put the rest of his makeup on correctly, he doesn’t know - he’s too busy being too aware of Erik’s eyes keenly watching his every movement. He draws in his eyebrows in dark brown; he puts on his wig and all of his ornaments, and he takes a breath and gets to his feet, and nods to Touya.

The white layers are soon concealed beneath the pale blue underkimono, decorated with gray silhouettes of cranes in flight. Charles fusses with the collars and sleeves until Touya chuckles and makes him hold out his hands to the sides.

There’s a quiet whistle from the corner when the kimono is on Charles’s shoulders, when the obi has been tied into place.

Charles smiles, and bows to Touya, before turning to Erik. “Well, do I pass muster?”

It takes a minute before Erik replies. “Do you make a habit of damning yourself with faint praise?”

Charles laughs - and then he looks at Erik, looks at the white box, looks at Touya. He tilts his head at his _otokoshi_ , who glances between him and Erik and starts to smile. 

“Tonight?” Touya asks, though he sounds entirely unsurprised. “But I thought you were saving it for next week.”

“He’s here, so we might as well - and it will go with my outfit, won’t it?” 

“True. And it is also true that you are very vain.” But Touya goes and gets the box, and when he passes Erik he says, “I would like to ask you for a favor, and that on Kiriya-san’s behalf: will you please get undressed.”

“What,” Erik says, his face gone completely blank.

Charles laughs and sits down again on the cushion next to his makeup table. “Do as he says, please. Out of your fine suit. The penalty I impose on you for coming here unexpectedly is, you get to receive my birthday present a week early.”

Touya unpacks the box with a flourish, and in it rests a complete kimono ensemble that looks very much like his: the main pieces are in a dark magenta shot through with murasaki purple and black threaded in a very subtle silver-gray, and the white underkimono has wide red bands at collar and sleeve - the exact same shade of red as in Charles’s obi, in fact. 

As Charles watches, Erik’s eyes flick from the box to himself - and then Erik nods and smiles and starts stripping.

Touya carefully sets aside each piece of discarded clothing so nothing wrinkles, and holds up a hand to stop Erik once he’s down to his underwear and socks. 

“Socks off, there’s another pair in there,” Charles murmurs, and throws Erik a coy smile. “The rest you can leave on.”

To his credit, Erik takes Touya’s work in stride, even going so far as to tweak his sleeves exactly as Charles did earlier - and when everything is in place and Touya has smoothed the haori over Erik’s shoulders, Charles goes over to him and redoes the knot in the haori cord just for something to do.

That gets him a grin from Erik, and a groan from Touya, and Charles returns the smile and sticks out his tongue at his _otokoshi_. 

“I know when I’m not wanted,” Touya mock-grumbles - but he does bow very formally, to both Charles and Erik, once he’s in the corridor.

“Thank you,” Erik says.

Touya smiles, and slides the doors closed with a flourish.

Once they’re alone Charles looks at his reflection and Erik’s, side by side and so close there’s barely an inch of space between them. 

They look good together, the two of them in kimono.

Charles smiles, and in the privacy of this room he’s allowed to do something like this. He reaches for Erik’s hand - and he’s only halfway through the motion when Erik’s hand touches his.

Charles can see their joined hands in the mirror, and the image is good and right and wonderful. The image is something to remember.

Heads turn to look as Erik follows him out of the house, as they thread the short path that will take them toward the teahouses - and they may be an arm’s length apart but Charles cannot stop smiling, and cannot stop feeling Erik’s eyes on him, just as he cannot take his eyes off Erik.


End file.
